


Under the Waves

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: 2.09 AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Marriage, Romance, Trauma and recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-09
Updated: 2014-02-13
Packaged: 2018-01-08 03:44:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 29,827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1127929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She tries to hold out, for longer and longer, like a child holding their breath under the water. Eventually she’ll drown, or come up for air, lungs burning. Either way, it’ll be over. She’ll be done running away.</i> Will doesn't have his revelation on Election Night, and by Friday, MacKenzie has decided to embed again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Falling Away

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** So... Meg says I have to apologize for this fic, because apparently the plot device is cruel and unusual, but she also helped me expand it into four parts, so I don't really know what to say about it. I don't... exactly... know... where this came from, except that I have a very twisted sense of irony. 
> 
> Essentially, the idea was, "what if Will didn't have his revelation while talking with Charlie and therefore doesn't propose, or tell Mac that he kept the ring?" So assume that everything in 2.09 happened, except the proposal and the announcement thereof, and all the little butterfly effects of that. The title is snatched from the Pete Droge song of the same name, as are the lyrics at the top of every chapter. 
> 
> Thanks to Aly and Meg for helping me through this!

_Under the waves, deep in the drift_   
_I can feel the salt upon my skin._   
_Under the waves, falling away_   
_I no longer see the rings of rain._

* * *

 

She runs away again.

It is a fact, as simple and as old as the sea: those who know the storm sicken of the calm. And MacKenzie has always run away from happiness, fair winds, and calm seas.

But it’s not happiness that she is fleeing this time, and perhaps that’s why she manages to slip away.

Maybe she has never fled from happiness at all, and that has been her problem, in the taking of more than her own fair allotment of joy and in turn, the universe crashing sorrow over her head in drowning waves and rushing tides, hoping that eventually, eventually, she will learn her lesson.

She runs from sorrow, because it is easier to run than to look back and find herself to be the one who is losing. She runs away because she is angry. Angry at Will and angry that she has to be angry at Will, and angry at herself for letting Will became that large in her mind, for creating him carved from impermeable rock, perfect and inhuman and everything, _everything_ , that she has ever wanted. She runs away because she forgot that while gods are infallible, they are not imperfect. And because he is not a god, and he only fell from Olympus because she put him there to augment her own selfish grief, to make her first exile one of dignity and purpose. She is not a tragic Greek heroine. Not this time.

She is angry at him, and because she has not loved him as he has deserved. She is angry because she deserves to be. She runs away because she has no stomach for vengeance, not against him. Never against him.

Let them blame it on her. Let the lawyers blame it on her and resolve the suit and she will be gone, gone to another far-flung, fragile corner of the world, because she will never _learn._ Because she holds her anger like a rock in her fist, a chip on her shoulder, off of his, the words _I love you_ carved in stone like a curse.

She runs away because she loves him and because the seas are foul, and because she can no longer trust him to carry her through to shore, her lighthouse of a man—solid, and true, and always lighting the way back to harbor.

(Because she is a coward, and because to stop running would mean facing what she’s done, what they’ve both done. Because she has not learned to captain her own ship. She is good at doing the news, and everything else falls at last place--what has that done but render her failures into bedrock, again and again?)

She runs away again because she knows he will not chase her.

 

* * *

 

“I’m leaving,” she tells him at the end of the week. In person, because she took him at his word when he said “end of broadcast,” even though their contracts stipulate “at the end of the business week,” and hasn’t shown up Wednesday or Thursday, but at the end of the show on Friday. “Not ACN. Just _News Night_. Charlie’s sending me to be the point person for the embed teams in the Middle East.”

This is a lie. Not entirely. But she won’t stay safe, tucked away in CENTCOM.

“Jim will stay with you.”

For a while, out of deference to her. And then, he too will wash out like the sea. He too has known the storm, and the suit will be settled and all will be too calm for someone like him.

Will doesn’t tell her not to go.

“When are you going?” he does ask, his hand drifting to the handle on the top drawer of his desk, looking like he wants to ask her more.

She crosses her arms under her chest, staring down at her feet. “I’m heading to DC as soon as I can pack up my apartment. I won’t have a problem finding someone to sublet it to.” She pauses, biting her lip, biting back all the words that threaten to spill out. _I love you. How could you? Why did you tell me? Do you hate me that much, even after all this time?_ “And then Germany, in a month. After that… I don’t know. It’ll be fine, Will. With me gone, the suit won’t have any ground.”

“You weren’t fired,” he protests.

She almost laughs. She really screwed him on that, didn’t she? Got what she wanted, and then some. Of course Will couldn’t let her walk out of here unscathed after manipulating him like that. Even if neither had them had intended… well, _he_ had intended. She had just let the idea of… she hadn’t played to his vanity intending to hurt him, but after seeing how _well_ it worked… she’s always allowed herself to be swept out to sea, never fought the currents for too long. It was true that this contract would have been her longest, three whole years in one place.

But it feels finished.

It’s for the best she leaves, now. Maybe now they can both be free of each other. He’s evened the scales. She can walk away and they can both move on.

“I was fired from the show,” she counters, as unemotional as possible. “And reassigned to a much less glamorous position.”

He scoffs. “That’s more than what Dantana got.”

“I’ll come back if they need me to testify, but I think Rebecca will get the case dismissed.”

“And then what, MacKenzie?” She can’t tell if he’s angry, or sad, or… what. She can’t read his face, and it’s bothering her. “If it’s dismissed?”

She shrugs. “And then it’s finally over, I guess."

_Genoa. And us._

"Don't you think?"

His hand tightens on the handle to the drawer like a question unasked, unanswered. Just hanging there, waiting. But the answer depends solely on the question being asked in the first place, which she knows Will won’t do.

She’s been waiting thirty-two months for him to give her anything. So she walks out of Will McAvoy’s office, and out of Will McAvoy’s life.

Again.

 

* * *

 

In the end, MacKenzie sends herself off to be embedded with Syrian rebels.

Will sends her emails.

Or she assumes he’s still sending them, by August, after they’ve left the rebels to base themselves in Damascus with the civilians. She changed emails months ago, giving her new address out only to the reporters she’s acting as point for, Jim, Charlie, and more recently, Sloan. She thinks maybe if she waits long enough to check her old email, the tidal wave will be enough to send her back home.

Or if there’s nothing, then it’ll make the decisions for her to stay here.

But she lets herself be angry, for a little while. Lets herself run away from him, until someone makes the decision to stay or go for her.

The suit was dismissed in June. Charlie and Jim told her--Charlie via phone call and Jim via email--within five minutes of it happening, as if it would be enough to bring her home. It wasn’t. There’s only one person who will be enough to bring her home, and she hasn’t forgiven him enough yet to let him be that person.

She knows she will, though. And it hurts, that she knows that she’ll fold. So she tries to hold out, for longer and longer, like a child holding their breath under the water. Eventually she’ll drown, or come up for air, lungs burning. Either way, it’ll be over. She’ll be done running away.

Because Will is her lighthouse, even if she cannot, will not, it’s not fair to either of them, think of him as a god. He will bring her home, across stormy seas. Even if, especially if, she was the one to send herself out onto the waves in the first place.

MacKenzie is in front of the camera and doing voiceovers for the first time in over three years, and she _knows_ that they’ve been airing on _Right Now_ and _News Night_ , and even if the live reports are handled by Sam, an old friend friend from Pakistan, Will still has to introduce her. And let nothing but journalistic professionalism show on his face.

But she’s not cruel.

It’s Sam, a woman in early-thirties with a phD in the field of the post-Cold War Middle East, an attractive, articulate redhead who remembers “the ex” from their first time embedded together, who has to actually talk to Will. (It’s the few times a month Mac has Will and Jim in her ear, while she produces the segments on her end, a few feet behind the camera.) _This is Samantha Hahn, reporting for ACN from..._ (After the suit was dismissed, she talked Jim out of leaving out of his own petty malice, misplaced loyalty to her. _Take the EP position. Stay eighteen months, and then get any job you want._ ) So she listens to Sam talk to Will, and Will talk to Sam, and Jim give Will terse, somewhat-antagonistic instructions (she wonders, sometimes, why Will hasn’t fired Jim), and it’s enough to keep her from opening her old email.

It’s enough to keep her from drowning. Enough to keep her across the sea.

 

* * *

 

They don’t sleep the night of August 20th, 2013, working late into the night to finish editing together footage, reports on rebel activity in Ghouta and the other Damascus suburbs.

At 2 AM, August 21st, the ground begins to shake.

 

* * *

 

Charlie doesn’t actively keep him updated on the location of MacKenzie’s team, and Will doesn’t ask, but when reports start coming down the wire about shelling in Ghouta he figures out that she’s there fairly quickly, even if her name isn’t on the news alerts. So when Charlie comes to his office, battle-weary and clutching a bottle of scotch, Will isn’t surprised.

“It’s her,” Will says, forming his words loosely; a statement, not a question.

(While not surprised, he is still in shock.)

“Yeah, it’s her.”

He closes the web browser. Jim will have the others watch it. They’ll know. He looks up at Charlie, his hands braced on his knees, palms slick with sweat. He’ll know. If something happens to her…

(It will be his fault.)

They’ll know.

“She’s going to go out into it,” he says. “She won’t stay in. Not if there’s a story.”

“No.” Charlie shakes his head, pouring one glass, and then another. “She won’t stay in.”

Will traces the pad of his finger over the rim of the glass, watching. Just watching. Remembering lines in emails. His. And hers, the ones he opened in June, and read all in one night, when he was certain he was going to lose Jim, his last tether to MacKenzie. And again, when it became that apparent that Jim was going to stay. Maybe he hadn’t allowed himself to read them before then because he knew he’d forgive her if he read them. He, very tentatively, allows himself to hope that that’s why Mac hasn't responded to any of his attempts at communication either.

“We wait,” he rasps.

“We wait,” Charlie agrees, settling in.

 

* * *

 

A little after 4:30 AM, she decides she wants to venture out. The neighborhood has been quiet for over an hour now. Not quiet, Mac quickly amends. There are screams, pounding footsteps, banging doors. No bombs. No bombs in over an hour.

“No one has to go,” she tells her team. “But I am. I have the hand-held, I can do a report by myself. _No one has to go if they don’t want to._ ”

Sam does, in the end, an eyebrow arched loftily. She’s kind enough not to speak the word “Islamabad."

“I’ll go,” is what Sam does say, and they don long sleeves and long pants, thick boots, secure vented masks over their faces. “Do you want to be on camera, or should I?”

“I will,” Mac says, fixing her mask loosely enough to be pulled on and off her face, leaving instructions with the rest of the team to wait for their word back, and to keep sending things down the wire until then. And then walks out the door, one of the satellite phones on her hip, choosing (with two of them) to take the larger camera rather than the hand-held.  

They are greeted by bodies.

For blocks.

And it’s almost funny, in a way. Or it would be, if Mac didn’t feel herself slowly losing her shit, the camera panning to capture footage that would, unquestionably, need to be blurred for broadcast. Civilians run past them, screaming and yelling and medics stream past with kits and its chaos. And it’s funny, because Mac knows within half a mile that it’s sarin.

Someone—the Syrian government or the Syrian rebels—dropped sarin on Ghouta.

And that is when Sam sends the first message back to their _ad hoc_ headquarters. And Mac confirms it, over the phone, to her assistant producer.

“Send it down the wire. Say its sarin. We don’t know who dropped it, but its sarin.” She does laugh a little, then. ACN will be breaking the news that someone dropped sarin. Absolutely no one is going to believe them. She saw a BBC crew a few blocks over, but she doesn’t even think they would… they were running for cover, only she’s fucking crazy enough to keep going, she thinks, tugging her mask back over her face. She looks at Sam. “You can head back.”

“Only if you’re coming with me,” Sam bites back, hefting the camera back onto her shoulder.

Mac snorts. “No one is going to believe us, you know.”

Sam rolls her eyes, but her response is cut off by a sudden barrage of sound overhead, before a series of deafening explosions from the block over knock them to the pavement.

Head ringing, Mac tries to stagger to her feet—seconds, maybe a minute later. Sam is above her, shouting, trying to pull her up. Her chest is tight, her head swimming, eyes burning, and grabbing onto some vector of strength, fleeting as it is, and Mac manages to wrap her arm around Sam’s middle and they both get to their feet. They carry the camera between them, if only because Mac refuses to let it go, and it’s still running, and Mac looks behind her for a second—just a second—and almost falls. She manages to get the camera up onto her shoulder one last time, Sam half-bracing her, and subconsciously tugs the mask away from her lips.

“As you can see, a distinctly Syrian military fighter plane is dropping shells with what certainly appears to be sarin gas onto civilians, and—”

Coughing violently, she bends at the waist, curling around the camera.

Sam roughly (“Not again.”) yanks the mask back over her face, and sets them both back onto the path away, back towards home base.

She won’t let go of the camera.

She has proof.

This time she has footage, raw footage, raw, undoctored, uncooked _footage_ , of a plane and shells and screaming civilians, she has it, ACN has it, and Will is going to report on it, they’re the only ones who have it—

She can’t breathe.

Sam carries her another block, before everything starts to go dark, blackness encroaching in on her blurred, pained vision, and everything rushes out entirely before the wave crashes down and she’s being carried in someone’s arms, into the little house they’ve leased for the past few months, people shouting and everything _hurting._ She gasps, still coughing, when she realizes the camera is not within her grasp, and she tries to sit up, fighting for breath on the floor, dazed, trying to locate it, calming when she finds it in Meg’s hands a few feet away.

“Send it,” she chokes out. “Jim. Send it to Jim. _Now._ ”

And then the tide rushes out again, or she’s drowning, or maybe both, because she vomits and slumps down onto her side, and she has no idea whether or not Meg sent the video to Jim or not, but she’s in the back of a car, and her head is killing her and she can’t quite get her limbs to cooperate enough to move.

She can laugh though, because heavens forbid God deprive her of laughing at the irony of the situation. Sarin. Someone dropped sarin on her. It makes sense. She cheats on Will, someone stabs her in the gut. A nice, open, bleeding wound. She puts Genoa on the air, accuses the US military of using nerve gas, and someone actually drops sarin on her. It’s neat. Tidy.

She can’t breathe.

Oh God, _Will._

She hasn’t forgiven Will. He probably thinks she—and she doesn’t—and it’s all her fault, again, she’s fucked everything up again, and she loves him, she’ll never stop loving him—even if he doesn’t love her, she loves him, she’ll always love him—

( _Will’s doing alright_ , Sloan’s last email had said. She always gave Mac updates. Oblique, cursory, to the point. _He and Maggie are pulling through together_.)

Oh God, it hurts, and she wants him—

The tide rushes out.

She can’t think. Nothing is making sense, and she thinks she still might be laughing, or it might be in her head, and she tells Meg that they should go to the British Embassy, because her father would be able to help them, forgetting that the British Ambassador was recalled in February 2012.

Her limbs are shaking. She can feel that. Even if she can’t move them, her legs kicking uselessly. That makes sense. That’s all that can make sense.

_Will._

She can't fight it; the tide rushes out.

She’s on a bed, somewhere, and a moment later Dan tells her it’s the US Embassy in Damascus, and Ambassador Ford has her father and some friends in Landstuhl on the phone, and her father is talking to British forces, and Meg emailed the footage to Jim, and is on the phone with him right now, and it’s a little too much so she keeps nodding, only really getting every third and fourth word and she notices vaguely that Dan’s not touching her, is keeping five feet away, and somewhere, faintly, she remembers decontamination procedures for sarin and she waves him off when someone places an oxygen mask over her face.

She doesn’t feel the IV entering the vein in her left arm a moment later.

The atropine, a moment after that, knocks her out completely.

 

* * *

 

“Yeah, I’m seeing it. You haven’t? I… shit, Meg.” Jim watches Mac’s footage (“Start at 28:30,” Meg had told him), the clear picture of the Syrian military gassing civilians, Mac’s choked voice narrating over the screams of people running in the other direction. And then the camera is knocked down, and all he can hear is violent, unforgiving, hacking coughs… and the footage keeps going, the camera is eventually placed on someone’s shoulder, and someone on the team is filming Mac being carried in Dan, the cameraman’s, arms, and Sam weaves in and out of frame, and it’s loud, and Mac is… He realizes Meg, panicking now, is still talking and he hasn’t heard a word in over ten minutes. “Okay, you stay close. I’m going to put you on hold and take this to Charlie Skinner so he can figure out what to do, okay? Stay close.”

He knew this was going to happen.

He knew _something_ was going to happen.

Crossing the bullpen, he hears Gary shouting out that Mac’s group is reporting its sarin gas. Jim brushes him off, anger building as he marches to Will’s office. He should have gone to her, in June, like he planned.

And he… he doesn’t know what happened between Mac and Will on Election Night, except that it was nasty, nasty enough to send Mac, now the wronged party, running again. He should have gone with her.

It’s not until he gets to Will’s doorway that Jim realizes he doesn’t have a fucking clue what to say, but half a second later he realizes he doesn’t have to, because Will blanches at the sight of him, or the look on his face, probably, and Jim just tells him to _move_ and he gets himself in front of Will’s computer and signs into his email.

“The reports are true then?” Charlie asks, stunned, coming around the desk. “It’s sarin? Have you heard from her?”

Jim just downloads the footage, and starts it at the thirty minute mark. Stepping back to stand behind Will, he folds his arms under his chest. And lets the video run until Mac, sweating, tears streaming down her face, barely-conscious in the back of a military-grade Jeep starts convulsing and calling out for Will, an embassy officer surrounded by armed guards lifts her out of the vehicle and out of frame, and Meg finally switches off the camera.

Unable to watch Will’s face after that, but unwilling to give an inch, Jim looks only at Charlie. “I would have come sooner but I didn’t want the AP on the ground to have to explain it twice. Mac’s Dad is already calling in all his favors on the Eastern front. The British military is sending in a medevac out of Turkey, and she—and Sam Hahn—will be taken to Landstuhl. Right now they’re both being seen by consulary doctors. Sam’s in better shape than Mac. They’ve both been given a round of atropine and pralidoxime each and are responding to treatment.”

He pauses. He sees Will recoil out of the corner of his eye.

“Meg, the AP, said that Mac, or, Sam told Meg that Mac—”

“Took off her mask to finish the report,” Will finishes, and for a long moment Jim’s concerned that he’s going to pass out, but Will recovers, somehow. “So she could be heard on camera. Over the…”

“Yeah.” Charlie nods.

Jim clears his throat. “What do we want to do with the footage?” The footage Mac almost died for. The footage Mac was going to get herself killed for. “Should we pass it off to dayside?”

Jim looks to Will, for the first time in _months_ , and then feels guilty in a way, when he sees that Will is looking up flights to Berlin and Frankfurt. Swallowing down the uneasy lump in his throat at the sight of Will’s distress, he turns to Charlie, who has already collected himself.

“No,” Charlie says, drawing back his shoulders. “Our girl got that with her blood, sweat, and tears--that footage stays in _her_ house.” Because even ten months gone, _News Night 2.0_ is still MacKenzie’s. They run it like its still Mac’s ship. Like she’s the boss. Like she’ll be back one day. “Give dayside the salient details, and let the staff run with what MacKenzie got us. We’ll put Sloan and Elliot on the air tonight with the footage. Will?”

“Yeah?”

“Take Jim with you. If for no other reason than he can throw himself between you and his Excellency, who if I remember correctly, is not entirely charmed that you were a factor in his daughter’s going to Syria in the first place.”

Jim bites back _don’t expect much throwing_ , but only because it really does look like Will might throw up. Or pass out. Or both. And because Will only just nods at Charlie’s suggestion.

So the Ambassador is pissed at Will.

Jim’s not exactly surprised. He’s been pretty pissed at Will, too. And at Mac, too, a little bit, for running. Or at least for running and not letting him run with her. “Anyway, I have Meg on hold. I can get the call transferred into here, or—”

His suggestion is cut off by Will’s cellphone going off. Will steels himself for the duration of a ring before answering it, and Jim can guess who’s calling just by that.

“Lady McHale. I—yes, Susan.” He pauses, and Jim can hear Mac’s frantic mother on the line, even while standing a few feet away. “No, I don’t think we know any more than you do.” Another pause. “Yes— _yes_ , Jim and I are—I’m looking up flights right now, yes, I know I’m an idiot, ma’am. Sir. Yes. Jim is here too. I’m booking two red-eyes into Frankfurt.”

Fifty minutes later, they’re being swept through security by British customs agents and flying to Frankfurt to meet a charter plane to Ramstein, all thanks to Mac’s parents, who apparently gave Mac her complete inability to hold a grudge.

Or, at least, that’s what Jim’s assuming as to why Sir Edward McHale offered to fly the ex-boyfriend who broke his daughter’s heart twice to Ramstein in the middle of the night. Well, that and the fact that Jim’s pretty certain that Sir Edward has somehow gotten his hands on the footage of his little girl crying out for said ex-boyfriend while in excruciating pain… and Sir Edward has never been able to deny MacKenzie much of anything.

 

* * *

 

Her world has narrowed to one simple truth: _it hurts_. The two words push out through her, inhabit every inch, every nook, every dark shadow, until it is the pulsing of her heart and the thrumming in her head and the storm ravaging her veins, choking her lungs with seawater and clogging her nose and _she can’t breathe_ and her chest is tight and her limbs keep thrashing without preamble or postscript.

She wants calm seas and still waters and Will. She wants to go home. She wants _him_. Her lighthouse. But now MacKenzie thinks that she’s allowed herself to be swept too far out to sea. She must be dying. This has to be what dying feels like. She doesn’t remember the last time, it had all happened so quickly, but they keep her awake now, checking neurological functions and urine outputs and pupil dilation.

Energy coils and releases under her skin, tightening in her muscles painfully before the shuddering unchaining of her tired limbs, holding her under the surface of wakefulness without letting her drown, just holding her until her lungs burn and she feels like she's about to burst out of her skin.

She wants Will, because for some reason she thinks that if he was here it would stop, he could make it stop, because he’s always been able to make it stop—her whirling thoughts, he’s always anchored them (that’s a terrible pun, she almost laughs, would if she could), forced them to stop and hold steady. He’s always held her steady. And maybe she’s always wanted it and has run from it, too, because she’s not very good at having what she wants. Because she could have stayed, Reese and Leona weren’t firing anyone and her firing was only between her and Will (and Charlie, the next morning) and maybe she should have stayed where it was calm and she was steady, even if she and Will had problems to sort through but she ran away again because it got hard, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of him telling her to get out of his life this time.

And Genoa. She didn’t just run away from Will. She ran from Genoa, instead of facing it. Or the suit, all of her failures. She skyped in a deposition and thankfully it never progressed past that, but she couldn’t—she should have—It was her fault, it’s all been her fault, and she’s only ever run during crises, thrown herself into something bigger. She’s no good man in a storm.

She left them. She left all of them. They shouldn’t have trusted her.

She left him.

 _I need you_ , she thinks, because it feels like everything is rushing out and closing in and she’s very quickly become a wave-tossed thing, and so she casts out the stone in her hand ( _I love you, I love you, I love you_ ) into the sea and it’s no longer a curse but a lifeline.  

She’s not strong enough to swim to shore. Eyes dimming, she tries to pick apart details inside the military aircraft, pulling them away from one another until they seem less daunting, trying to find little things to tether herself to, until they all spin away at once, and she can’t focus at all, the machine at her side beeping and warmth flooding her bloodstream, pressing her, down, down, under the surface of herself, until the pressure on her skin is Will’s hand in hers, his fingers stroking down her cheek, into her hair. Until the roar of the engine is the low rumble of his voice when he’s concerned.

She lets herself (is she letting herself? it’s something that seems inherent—he should be here, she needs him here, he is here) believe it’s him, that he’s sitting, leaning over her, and the engine and the radio chatter and the voices of the medical personnel all fade away. All noise is swallowed by silence, until it’s just the two of them, and—

The tide rushes out.


	2. Caught in a Dream

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed or left kudos on Part I. The response to this was overwhelming! Thank you all. Thanks again to Aly and Meg for helping me! (And Meg for editing for my concussed ass.)

_Under the waves, caught in a dream_   
_Lover, can you hear me breathing?_   
_Under the waves, now that I'm giving up_   
_I can let the current carry me._

* * *

 

Jim’s asleep. Will’s not entirely certain _how_ , but he is. Or is doing a fine job of pretending to be, or maybe Jim is rational enough that he has worked himself into sleeping because he knows that he won’t get the chance again soon. But Will’s nerves are not so easily nor logically calmed, especially not _now_.

(Or ever.)

But Jim being asleep provides him with the cover to finally examine the object he had hastily stowed into his carry-on. (Not that either of them had had the time to pack luggage to check, Jim having grabbed the duffel he kept in his office—MacKenzie’s office, really, Jim had hardly removed any of her things, had kept it like a shrine to what used to be—in case of stories breaking overnight, and Will had just thrown a few things into his briefcase with the intention of buying whatever he may need once they land in Germany.) He still doesn’t know why he didn’t just _open the goddamn drawer_ ten months ago, when she was saying goodbye to him in his office. He had unlocked it moments before she had walked in, and he had… he was at least going to show it to her. That he had kept it. Torn up the receipt and kept it because it was going to be her, it _is_ going to be her, it’s always going to be her.

But he had lost his nerve at her dispassionate farewell, her seeming pronouncement of the end of their relationship sum total, and that had been the end of it. But looking back, Will wonders if maybe it was dispassion feigned to cover up hurt. Where he found anger, MacKenzie had always found nonchalance.

She had cried out for him.

It keeps replaying over and over again in his head.

It’s the real reason he doesn’t want to sleep, he thinks, hands shaking as he shakes the black velvet box out of the Tiffany blue packaging. If he sleeps, he’ll see her, face contorted in pain, screaming.

He used to have nightmares of it, when she was in Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Green Zone. He still has nightmares of it—Syria, in many ways, is more dangerous than when she went off to embed the first time. She has no marines to protect her in Syria, no military protection. _Had_ no marines. _Had_ no military protection.

Someone dropped sarin gas on his MacKenzie.

(On rebels. And civilians. In Damascus. But MacKenzie was there, she’s a civilian reporter.)

(Not that she’s his MacKenzie. No, he made quite sure of that over the past, what, six and a half years, now? They’ve been apart far longer than they ever had been together in the first place. Physically apart for half of their knowing of each other, too.

And he just… is keenly aware of how badly he’s fucked this up.)

And she…

Screamed his name while writhing in the back of the transport, while the poor girl who had been hired as her assistant held her hand. It was… the precise contents of his worst nightmares. Not that she… she rarely screamed his name, in these nightmares, the ones since she went to Syria. She just… would scream. And scream, and scream, covered in blood and sweat and dirt. Or in the nightmares that would render him completely unable to move upon waking, would lay silently on a road in a neighborhood flattened and scattered to debris and detriment, eyes wide upon, limbs splayed like a marionette with its strings cut. Lay, unable to wake. And he would be left, shaken, in bed, waiting for his BlackBerry to ring for Charlie or Jim to deliver the worst.

She screamed. He watched her scream, covered in blood and sweat and dirt.

On… film.

They land in Germany in six hours. The flight to Ramstein will be short. Will has been checking his phone every twenty or thirty minutes or so since take off to make sure… _She took off her mask_. And he knows, they all know, from Genoa, just how… and if she _inhaled_ it…

They used sarin.

He doesn’t take the ring out, just opens the clamshell box and stares at it. He knows _why_ he took it, but not what to do with it. Give it to her, Will supposes, in one manner or another. Not necessarily… he won’t _propose_ , not when she’s refused to speak to him in ten months. But it’s hers. It’s meant for MacKenzie. And if she won’t have him, she should have _it,_ after all the shit he’s pulled. Have it to keep, or sell, or…

To know. That he didn’t return it.

He’d written that, of course, in email after email. That he had kept the ring, that he had lied to her, that he was sorry, that he didn’t know why he had lied, why he had hurt her, why he had wanted to hurt her. That he had kept the ring in his desk for a year and half, closer to two and a half, now, with the intention of…

Will groans silently, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, letting the ring box snap closed and fall onto his lap.

She screamed for him.

It doesn’t make sense, after what he did. It doesn’t make sense, and he wants to believe that she, after all this time… it’s been nine years, since she first came to work as the EP of _News Night_. He’s been in love with her for nine years. He’s wasted so much _time_. He’d starting seeing Habib again after she left. Weekly, even. Going to all the appointments he paid for, to figure out why the fuck he…

_I love you. And I forgive you, not that you need my forgiveness anymore. I am in need of yours. I think I forgave you a long time ago, but refused to let myself see, and instead tried to even the scales only to tip them in your favor. Please, dear MacKenzie._

And signed his name, again and again and again or shortened it to his first initial or just, lately, _me_ , when it felt less like he was writing to Mac and more like he was just chronicling his guilt in a diary.

He read her emails, finally.

And now she won’t read his. Perhaps, though, Will figures, if she is truly indifferent, then would have read them, and turned him away. Her staunch refusal to even… it did indicate a level of emotion that would… and the ring, if she had not, that day in his office… and her repeated assurances that she had fell in love with him…

He never stopped loving her.

( _Your name, idiot._ )

Maybe she has never stopped loving him.

It’s a childish hope, but one that, in the past few hours, Will has begun to cherish.  

 

* * *

 

Maggie is the one who winds up with the footage, after downloading it from Jim’s email to a flash drive. No one should see it. It’s Mac. It can’t just be _delegated out_. She’s not going to farm this out to an assistant, or some late-night editor she doesn’t know, she’s not going to… it’s _Mac._

Sloan is still in Will’s office with Charlie. Jim had told everyone left in the bullpen, what had happened before it was put on the wires, before he and Will left for JFK to catch the first plane to Frankfurt. People were returning from home in droves, the newsroom coming back alive despite the hour.

With both Jim and Will gone, she supposes its Don and Elliot’s show now, but it’s still… this is _News Night_ , and Mac. Even if Mac’s nearly a year gone. Even if Mac told Maggie not to come to Syria to work with her, like Maggie had offered, months ago. Because Mac, Maggie thinks, wants the family to stay together. Because Mac is coming back. She’s going to come back, she had planned on coming back. Why else would she tell her and Jim (and Gary, she thinks, offered) to stay with Will?

Mac has never abandoned them. Maggie, _everyone_ , watched her beat herself up day after day for three years, watched her tear herself down after Genoa. Of course Mac had to get away, she was going to self-destruct if she didn’t. And Maggie… is intimately familiar with self-destructing.

(Her hair is longer now, faded to a strawberry blonde that she’s trying to keep up with, along with her therapy appointments. She sees Will’s therapist, has been since Will shuffled her into therapy when she finally broke down entirely after Mac went to embed. She has hair appointments every five weeks to touch up her roots and therapy every Tuesday morning, and sometimes she has lunch with Will where neither of them say very much at all, but they make a strange little family, the two of them, somewhat apart from the rest of the newsroom with Mac gone.)

It’s hard to watch—an understatement that leaves out how the footage leaves Maggie shaking, working her jaw while she tries to keep going through it. At a little past 34:15 she cuts the film, and puts the first three-fifths or so onto a drive for everyone to use. After that, no one should ever see it. Mac deserves that. Anyone… its basic human decency. No one should see Mac like that. She tucks the (one) drive holding the raw footage into her pants pocket, and starts editing together a segment for the show from what’s been saved onto Jim’s computer. She’ll go down to the actual editing bay later when it empties out when the morning shows are done with prep, but for now what Jim keeps software-wise on his desktop is enough.

They’ll need someone to do the voiceover, and with Will in Germany and Sam and Mac out of… commission…

Maggie mentally starts going down the list of correspondents and contributors, working, forcing herself to keep working, while more and more of the _News Night_ staff returns to the twenty-fifth floor in the middle of the night. Who was good enough?

A knock at the door startles her.

“Sloan.”

She’s been crying.

“That’s it, right?” She asks, not entirely able to look at Maggie, or the computer, as if she can’t trust what’s on Maggie’s face or the screen. Which Maggie thinks is probably fair. “The uh… Charlie said they caught it all on tape, and sent it to Jim. That Mac… that Mac _told_ them to send it to Jim.”

“Yes.”

“So you—” She stops, and shakes her head. “How—how bad is it? Have you—? Will, before he left, he didn’t say, and I didn’t think to ask—”

Maggie swallows hard. “I have it cut before she… if you want to watch it, Sloan. I’m putting together a segment, so there’s a version… there’s an edited version, you don’t have to watch the raw footage.”

Sloan doesn’t quite know how to take that, Maggie can see, hesitating in the doorway. “I should.”

“You don’t have to.” And if she’s not ready, she shouldn’t. Sloan’s never seen… Maggie doesn’t think Dr. Habib would be overly-impressed with her own reasons for watching Mac throw up and convulse in the back of a car, but Maggie has at least _seen…_ Sloan shouldn’t watch it if she’s not prepared, mentally. Or if it’s because she feels an obligation.

(Which is entirely hypocritical, but Maggie supposes that’s why she and Will have grown close these past months.)

“Will did,” Sloan protests, face hardening. Will and Sloan had fallen away a bit, when Mac had first left. And then somehow repaired their relationship. Maggie doesn’t pry, but she does know that Sloan emails Mac and Will doesn’t ask Sloan about it.

“That’s Will,” Maggie said slowly, because she’s not sure if that’s an argument to make. “You can watch the footage I’m putting on the air.”

“I just… is she… I can’t even. You know, we did the research. With Genoa. How quickly sarin can kill someone. And how. I remember the acronyms.” Sloan keeps talking in stops and starts, finally stepping out of the doorway and sitting in the chair in front of Jim’s—Mac’s—desk, clasping her hands on her lap and still not quite looking at Maggie. “What did she look like? After, when—I remember reading about the pupils, and—”

“Sloan, if you want to watch it, I won’t—I can lock the door. And I won’t—I can do whatever you need me to do.” She doesn’t want to influence Sloan either way, and she’s trying to choose her words carefully, but it’s not easy, not with Sloan looking like she might crumple at any second and Maggie feeling like the floor’s given out entirely, but she doesn’t want Sloan to do this for the wrong reason, or push herself too far. “But she—It’s hard.”

Sloan gulps down a sharp inhalation of air. “Charlie just got another call from Meg, at the embassy. Dan, their camera guy… is sick, but he’s not… his mask vented correctly, but he didn’t… Poor girl is—she’s Mac’s _assistant_. And now she’s running—she said that the medevac got off the ground without any problems, and that Sam’s vitals are stable but Mac is having problems with her oxygen saturation. The doctor at the embassy said they’ll probably need to set up a chest drain once they land in Landstuhl so she doesn’t develop pulmonary edema, or throw a clot, or air embolism, or…” Her voice trails off. “Something. I can’t remember.”

“Where’s Don?” Sloan needs his support. They’ve been together almost a year. And as the EP, he’s going to…

“On his way in,” she answers absently, before her eyes finally focus in on Maggie. “I should watch it before he comes in.”

“All of it?” Maggie clarifies, slowly still.

Sloan nods jerkily. “All of it.”

 

* * *

 

Sloan gets sick fifty-two minutes in, diving into the bathroom. Stopping the video and minimizing it, Maggie creeps into the doorway.

“How am I going to report this?” Sloan asks, resting her head on the rim of the toilet seat. “We’re going to have to report it.”

“I’m cutting the footage. No one else has to look at it, I can produce the segment.”

Sloan nods, not yet up to lifting her head. Switching on the tap, Maggie fills a cup with water for Sloan to rinse her mouth out with.

“I can… do the voiceover, too.”

“How many times have you watched it?” Sloan asks quietly.

Maggie sighs, carding a hand through chin-length hair. “Three. All the way through.”

“Do the voiceover. Do everything. And do not— _do not_ —let anyone else see Mac like that.”

Don arrives a little after that.

 

* * *

 

Sir Edward has said maybe three words to him, which Will expected, but Lady McHale (“Susan, dear. You know you can always call me Susan, William. We’ve known each other for far too long and love MacKenzie too much, and you, darling James, we meet in Landstuhl again.”) holds his hand until Mac is finally moved out of recovery to the ICU.

Will knows that Jim has been to see Sam Hahn (and that they’ve been friends for years, that Sam embedded with them back in ‘07, was with Mac and Jim in Islamabad), and Will knows that he should visit her, but he feels rooted to this chair in the private waiting room that the Ambassador has secured for them with his credentials.

The credits for _News Night_ are scrolling, and he hasn’t blinked since what feels like the middle of the D-block, hasn’t paid attention since Elliot finished the coverage of the attack in Ghouta at the end of the B-block. Maggie did the segment. Well, Elliot and Sloan both handled the segment, and Elliot reported that two ACN contributors were hospitalized in the attack (“We’re saddened to report that two of ACN’s own, Samantha Hahn and _News Night’s_ own former Executive Producer, MacKenzie McHale, were caught in the attack and are currently being treated for sarin exposure at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families.”), but Maggie was the voiceover on the segment on Mac’s footage.

He’s too exhausted to work out what he should make of that.

Will doesn’t realize that he’s drifted off until Lady McHale squeezes his hand, standing and letting go to smooth imaginary wrinkles from her slacks. “Sorry dear—the doctors have taken her off the ventilator and she’s breathing fine on her own, so they’re going to try to wake her up and perform a neurological exam. Ted and I are going back with her doctor to see that she’s fine, but we’re absolutely done in and plan on heading back to our hotel room after that.”

He waits for Susan to sweep out of the room in search of the Ambassador before leaning over and shaking Jim’s shoulder until he jerks out of the seemingly uncomfortable position he’s been sleeping in. After that it’s a tense forty minutes until Mac’s parents reappear in the doorway, looking greatly relieved.

“No deficits,” Susan announces. “That they can see. She’s asleep again, but they’ve taken her off the sedative.”

“And Mackie’s blitzed out of her mind, so there’s that.” The Ambassador scrubs a hand over his face. “Two chest drains, and dilaudid. Cocktail of antibiotics to try to prevent the pneumonia that’s already developing. I helped negotiate a treaty to prevent this from happening, you know—anyway. Not important. The hospital will give us a ring if we’re needed. Otherwise we’ll be back at noon.” He looks hard at both them; MacKenzie’s father is, while neither particularly tall nor broad, an imperious kind of man in his early seventies who had come across his ability to intimidate through nearly three decades of Cold War diplomacy and an uneasy retirement with his only child sending herself off into warzones. Even now, he is well-pressed, posture-perfect. “William. James. You are both on her health forms as next-of-kin, so they should let you back to see her when visiting hours start at 8. I would advise you both to get some sleep.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t.

Will puts two hotel rooms on his credit card for when that inevitably becomes a pressing issue (it is pressing, but seeing Mac is more important than sleeping) but otherwise settles in to wait until visiting hours begin. Jim wanders off for a little bit and returns with coffee.

“I wasn’t here the first time,” Jim eventually volunteers. “They only let me go as far with her as the naval base in Karachi. But Sir Edward and Lady McHale offered to fly me here when they heard that I was the one who got Mac out of the riot. Which is a bit of an exaggeration, because Mac was doing just fine until she decided to pull the knife out of her stomach and that was after we were away from the crowd.”

Will flinches. Jim is probably doing this on purpose. And… touché.

“By the time I got here the waiting room bit was over with.” Jim pauses, and then his voice softens. “She called out for you the first time, too. I tried to call, but… things got very chaotic, very quickly. And I had to hang up.”

Jim sighs, leaning his head back against the wall, tilting his chin up.

“She loves you. She was just pissed. And scared, because she’s spent a lot of time idolizing you and punishing herself. And when Mac’s scared…”

“She runs,” Will finishes. He doesn’t do much better, so he thinks he and Mac are pretty even on that one.

“She likes the storm. Someone once, one of the marines we were embedded with, called her a storm-braver.” Jim stops, taking a long breath. “I think she braves storms so that she doesn’t have to think about what she’s leaving behind. In hope that she won’t be the same person that she was when she went in, so she won’t _miss_ what she’s left behind. But she came back to you once.”

 

* * *

 

Her hair is much longer than he’s ever seen it; Will guesses that she hasn’t cut it since she left. The fact that that’s the first thing he notices when he walks into her private room in the ICU must be his brain protecting him, because when he finally starts noticing the other things, they overwhelm him.

The worst-case scenario was always her coming back in a box. Or not at all. He knows that the places Mac gets herself into, there isn’t always a body to send back home. So this isn’t… that. But looking at her like this is… she looks like a corpse. Or would, if it weren’t for the steady rise and fall of her chest, the steady report of the heart monitor.

She’s still.

He doesn’t remember the last time he saw her like this—unmoving, motionless, inert. It’s been seven years since they last slept in the same bed together, so maybe then, but the MacKenzie he remembers was frenetic, always moving, a perfect storm of energy and intelligence and capability and shrewdness that he very easily fell in love with. But she’s static now, weighted down by monitors and tubing connected to machines and bags and there are little rashes, on her eyelids and near her lips, and he knows that it’s from adhesive, because Mac has always been allergic to the adhesive on band aids so he thinks that means they taped her eyes shut at some point and the aggravated skin around her lips means that she was intubated.

She was like that, on Election Night. Or was… she _was_ slowing down, haltingly becoming paralyzed by anxiety and guilt. And maybe she had to start running, had to brave a storm, or whatever Jim’s metaphor was, to keep herself from shutting down entirely. Because of him.

 _MacKenzie is a woman who can make her own choices_ , Habib’s voice rings in his ear. And… okay. That’s true, she could have stayed, both times, but both times he didn’t really make it easy for her. And he knows, _now_ , that when she told him about Brian it wasn’t some ploy to make him break up with her. Because telling her about the ring wasn’t to make her leave. And because, he has to remind himself, like an alcoholic flipping a token between his fingers, that guilt and absolution is not a zero-sum game.

MacKenzie had made her choice. And so had he.

And except for everything they had done wrong, they had done everything right.

And she almost died.

 _Could still die_ , he corrects himself, thinking of all the possible complications from pneumonia and the convulsions she would be having for the next few months, bronchospasms and potential air emboli and…

This is why he needs to put it to rights. Right now. Because he lost his nerve, the last time, and while he isn’t entirely to blame for Mac shuttling herself into one of the most volatile countries of the world, his decisions played a large part in hers.

And he needs to put it to rights because he loves her. And you don’t… hurt the people you love.

When she finally wakes, it’s slow-coming.

For a while, Will thinks she might just drift back to sleep, but eventually she stirs enough to open her eyes. They don’t say anything—she looks at him, confused, eyes a little unfocused, pupils blown wide by the heavy dose of opioids her doctors have her on. And then slowly, she reaches out to him, fingers sliding on top of the blanket. Reaches out to him like she’s not entirely sure that he’s real, moving in little increments, eyes brightening in a way that makes him want to cry when she finally reaches his hand.

“Will?” she whispers, her voice flagging like a whistle, and soft in the way that sand is against smooth stone.

“I’m here,” he says, shuffling his chair closer and enclosing her hand in both of his. “I came. Do you know where you are?”

She sighs a little, eyes focused on their hands. “Germany. My parents... earlier... they told me. And I remember. A little.”

“Yeah.”

“The Syrian government used sarin,” she whispers sluggishly, clenching her eyes shut and then trying to get them to open wide and stay that way. “Did—did Jim get the footage?”

He reaches up with his other hand, brushing his fingers down her cheek. She weakly tugs him closer, and he moves to sit on the bed. “Yup. He got it. He’s here though, out in the hallway. He wouldn’t stay in New York.”

“Oh,” she says then, startled. “You’re here.”

He laughs a little, then. Fondly, because she’s coming alive again, even if it’s only in her eyes, her fingers tightening around his... and because she’s completely wasted. “I’m here.”

“I’m not hallucinating,” she says, not entirely certain.

“You’re not hallucinating,” he confirms tenderly, leaning to brush his lips against her forehead.

“I thought I was dying… so I…” She frowns, craning her neck to look up at him, so he sits back so she doesn’t have to. “I didn’t read your emails. Not because I hate you, but because I knew I’d… I’d go home if I did. To you. Home. And I wanted to be angry, for a bit. Like you were. I didn’t like it very much. I don’t know why I did that. And then I was dying and I hallucinated you.”

“It’s okay.” He rubs the back of her hand with his thumb. “You waited three years for me.”

“It’s really not,” she murmurs, still looks at him like she’s not quite sure what to make of him being here. Not that he blames her, or anything, but it’s a little unsettling, and he’s exhausted, and also happy, and the past day has been too surreal.

And then she laughs, indelicately, as one doped to high heaven does.

“Someone dropped sarin. On me. That shouldn’t be funny, but it’s pretty funny.”

Will doesn’t really know how to respond to that, so he tries to direct Mac to something less about the absurdity of the universe. “I read your emails.”

She frowns again at that, furrowing her brows. “I didn’t send you emails.”

“From Afghanistan, sweetheart. And Pakistan. The Green Zone. I read them.”

“Oh.” She sighs, and then winces. A machine at one of her side hisses in response, a terrible mechanical sound and her cheeks color faintly. “I think it was comeuppance.”

“What was, honey?” He keeps touching her. Carefully, painting love onto her skin.

“The bombs had stopped, so we went out. But there was one more…” She pauses, shakes her head slightly, closing her eyes. “The sarin, I mean.” Realization dawns on her face, and her eyes snap back to his face. “Wait, you… so _why didn’t you read them before?_ ”

He chuckles at that, but answers quite seriously, in the end. “Because I’m an idiot.”

“No you’re not.” She pouts, rather adorably, trying to shift within the narrow bed. Will tries to focus on that rather than the central line extending out of her blue gown, the various monitor nodes attached to her chest. “I wouldn’t be in love with you if you were an idiot.”

(Her loving him is beyond reason, his brain lets her blurry-eyed words rush out without processing them, because for him the universe has always been neatly divided into two's, and even though he's trying very hard to unlearn what he taught himself as a child to survive, for both their sakes, it's overwhelming and he's exhausted and  _so much_ and he thinks, strangely, that good things are sometimes harder for him to take than bad.) 

“I was an idiot, honey,” he tells her gently, stroking her cheek.

“Stop calling me honey.”

“You like it when I call you honey.”

Her mouth purses, eyes narrowing. “You’re being sweet so I won’t get mad. Quit it.”

“No, that’s not—” he begins, frustrated, telling himself that he can’t get angry at her. That he won’t be angry at her; and he’s not, not really, mostly at himself and old mistakes assigned to them both. He takes a breath, unlearning, overwhelmed. “I’m being ‘sweet’ because I love you,” he begins again, voice low. “And because someone, as you pointed out, dropped sarin on you, which, darling, was not comeuppance but a war crime, because Genoa wasn’t your fault, it was Jerry’s, and a federal judge can back me up on that.”

And then he finds that he can’t shut up, because he’s been internalizing this since they left to get on the plane, actually much, much, longer, and it comes bubbling up, because she needs to know _now_ , even if she’s so high she won’t remember, because he’ll just tell her again, and again, every damn day of the rest of their lives, if she wants him to.

“And because about twenty-four hours ago Jim got a phone call that you were in critical condition and all I could think was how I was such a fucking idiot ten months ago for letting you walk out of my life again—”

“Wait, Will—” She tries to interrupt, blinking rapidly, but if he stops now he’ll lose his nerve, and he can’t do that to her again, not now.

“—For making you walk out of my life again,” and it really starts coming out, and one hand is cupping her cheek, the other is lacing their fingers together and she’s not fighting him, just staring at him with something that might be wonder, but is probably shock, “when I could have just told you that I kept the ring, that I’ve been keeping the ring in my desk for two and a half years now, because I love you, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.”

“What?”

“And I’m never going to stop loving you. And I’m never going to hurt you again. Well, okay, I can’t promise that, that’s a stupid promise, but I’m never going to intentionally hurt you ever again.” He realizes, vaguely, that he’s just rambling now, but she’s alive, and she’s beautiful, and she’s _alive_. “Because I love you, I’ve—I’ve been in love with you, for almost a decade now, so as far as I can tell it’s not stopping, ever, and I don’t—I don’t want to stop loving you, even if I could, and I’m pretty sure that I can’t—”

“What in the fuck is happening right now?” she whines, almost wailing (would be wailing if her voice was stronger), entirely confused.

Right.

Dilaudid.

Shit, is she even going to remember this?  _She remembers talking to her parents a few hours ago._

He slows down, lowering his voice, licking his lips before starting over. “I kept the ring, MacKenzie. I didn’t return it. Because I love you. It’s yours, if you want it.”

She smiles, widely and a little bit crookedly. “Are you proposing to me?”

“Well, not really,” he laughs, relief flooding his chest, washing away dread he hadn’t realized was weighing down his lungs. And then remembers how ridiculous (and serious) the situation is. “You’re pretty wasted. So you can’t actually, you know, consent to marriage right now.”

“Yes,” she says, assuredly, the goofy smile still on her face, almost dissolving like sea foam into her pillows. “I’m saying yes.”

This throws him off, because she really, shouldn’t. It doesn't make sense. 

(She loves him. How?  _What?_ )

And once she’s weaned off the drugs, she might regret this, and she can’t just go announcing this to people now, like Jim or her parents, if she wants to take this back later. “Honey, MacKenzie sweetheart, not that I don’t want to marry you, because I do—I really, really, do, but you’re on a very high—there is a very high concentration of pain medication just blowing through your bloodstream right now, and we haven’t even spoken in ten months, we have a lot to work out—”

“Billy, I’m going to marry you,” she giggles. “I’ve wanted to marry you for seven years now, even after all of our shit. We’re getting married. You can’t back out of this now.”

“I have absolutely no intention of backing out of this. I just want you to—”

“We’re getting married,” MacKenzie declares, slitting her eyes at him in a way that is completely final, “you floofy-haired nitwit, and that’s the end of it.”

Will doesn’t know how to respond to that, except to chuckle, pressing a kiss to her cheek. “Yes, dear.”

He still doesn’t know how she’ll react to him once they start weaning her off the narcotic, but right now, he’s feeling better than he has in a year.

Possibly in his entire life.

(It feels like his future is a thing exists again.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	3. Surface Wounds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Thanks to everyone for waiting. And thanks for everyone who left comments or kudos on the last chapter! They are all very much appreciated. I'm back at school for the spring semester, but since the workload hasn't really started up yet I hope I can get out Part IV with some amount of expediency, although I plan on giving _Loose Ends_ a much-needed update first. 
> 
> Also... this part wound up much longer than intended, but I doubt anyone will mind.

_I want to feel it, if just to know its true_   
_Look me over—it's just a surface wound._   
_Don't pay to fight it; can't change the color blue._   
_All I wanted was to impress you._

* * *

 

A week and a half later, they haven’t spoken about it—her semi-delirious, drug-addled assertion that they were going to get married, and his rambling, ineloquent declaration of love.

They haven’t necessarily ignored it, either, but with the neurologist weaning Mac off of the narcotics and trying to find a good balance of neuroinhibitors and Mac being fucking exhausted all the time, between physical therapy and the muscle tremors and the weakness and numbness in her limbs and the convulsions and—she’s fucking exhausted.

And _he’s_ fucking exhausted, but obviously not as much as she is by far, so he thinks that by unspoken agreement they’ve decided to focus on getting her back to being able to stand unsupported before discussing bigger things like how much they fucked up their relationship and where to go from here.

(It seems pointless to discuss these things, like Mac’s return to New York and _News Night_ , when she can’t take more than ten steps without her legs giving out from under her and the team of doctors overseeing her recovery think she’ll be lucky if she’s discharged by the middle of September and fully recovered by Thanksgiving.)

The neurologist says that the major effects of sarin exposure on her nervous system should be fading.

And they are—but he’s the one who walks in her laps around the neuro ward, feels her sag against him, is the one whose shoulder she buries her face in when her legs stop working the way they should.  

He’s the one who’s there when her nerves decide to light up her synapses and send messages from nowhere to nowhere, making muscles coil painfully under her skin, tense and let go and tense and hold, and tense and tense and she tries to breathe through it, and he _can’t touch her_ when this happens and it’s like fucking murder until the muscle relaxants they have her on kick in.

 _Those_ episodes are down to maybe one a day, which is a relief.

But they leave her red-faced and sweating, heart pounding, and sometimes she’ll be strong enough that he can help her bathroom to wash her face and peel off her pajamas and clean her pale, needle-bruised skin with the toiletries her mother had moved into the en suite shower (even if she can’t, with all the monitors and her IV and the one chest drain they haven’t removed, actually shower yet) and help her change. But in the beginning, when the attacks or the convulsions would come every few hours, she was too weak for that and so early on the nurses had gotten used to him waving them off so that he could take care of her himself, especially when she was still on the narcotics and not entirely herself, by turns heart-rendingly vulnerable and completely without any sort of mental filter. And so she’d lie in bed, the oxygen provided to her through the nasal cannula trying to keep pace with her increased, ragged breaths while he spoke to her in low tones about anything from the truly inane to things he’d written in his emails, all the while gently sponging the sweat from her brow and arms and collarbones.

At least once she was out of the ICU and moved into an in-patient ward he could curl up next to her, or behind her, once she was feeling well enough to lay on her side, after.  

It’s then that MacKenzie likes to be held, touched, and he’s figured out how to soothe her frayed nerves in days since. Softly, slowly, steadily, tracing the pads of his fingers over her thighs and calves, thickly-roped muscles, before working up to finer-threaded biceps and triceps, before bringing the flats of his palms around to lay over the her sides, carefully avoiding where the chest tube is taped down to her ribs.

He talks about Maggie, and how she might start doubling by helping produce Sloan’s show, or take over producing Sloan’s segments on _News Night_ by herself entirely. And how Don and Sloan have apparently become Leona’s new hope for (surrogate) grandchildren, because Reese broke it off with the Rockette in March and hasn’t been seeing anyone since, so Leona keeps offering Don unsolicited ring advice and dropping hints to Sloan about how she never had a daughter to go wedding dress shopping with. How everyone’s been waiting for Jim and Maggie to get their shit together since Hallie broke it off with Jim because long distance just wasn’t working for them anymore.

He doesn’t tell her that everyone is circling the space she left behind in the newsroom, because she’s the center, even now; she’s the center even if she’s not a fixed point. She’s their linchpin, and he and Jim have been holding everyone together and he knows she’s been making sure that they don’t leave, but she needs to come back because the thirty-two months it was _their show_ was the first time in his life he had a home, had a family. He doesn’t tell her that she needs to come back that because without her there to play team mom it’s not half as fun to play team dad and Jim can be a real punk when Mac isn’t there to rein him in, and Will only just started to understand how deep Jim’s loyalty to her went after she left and Jim didn’t have to hide his dislike of Will’s behavior towards her out of some strange kind of deference to her wishes.

 _She_ tells _him_ to go back to his hotel, get an actual night’s sleep, shower, shave, _take care of yourself, sweetheart, before I tell Jim to get you with one of those syringes of Lorazepam._

_You wouldn’t dare._

_Wouldn’t I, Billy?_

So, on night nine, he finally goes back to the hotel at a decent hour and gets twelve hours of sleep in an actual bed, not in a chair or curled around Mac. He brings her outside food as soon as he’s able, when the doctors finally clear her from having potentially ingested sarin and put her on an unrestricted diet on day ten.

(Her lungs are still struggling, but the pneumonia is clearing up thanks to the chest drains and the early hard-hitting dose of whatever antibiotic or antiviral they gave her while they still had her sedated the first twenty or so hours she had been in Germany. Her hands still shake, she can’t lift much, and she’s still having trouble walking, and Mac is too proud for a walker—she’ll just use him, which is fine, but Will knows they’ll eventually have to go back to New York and she can’t use him 24/7 there. But she’s getting better.

He reminds himself of that every time he sees her.

 _It’s not perfect, but it’s going to be okay._ )

He brings her lunch, returning from some deli that the US servicemen frequent (meaning that the staff can speak English; Mac’s German is much, much better than his, by which Will means that Mac speaks German with some degree of fluency and he can say five words of it, maybe, all economic terms), to find Mac sitting up against a mountain of pillows, Sam wrapped in a heavy blanket and bundled into the recliner next to the window, and Jim slumped in Sam’s wheelchair with his feet up next to Mac’s at the end of her bed.

 

* * *

 

Sam’s getting discharged tomorrow, which means tomorrow she and Will will start broadcasting on Syria from the hotel suite AWM has put them up in, with Jim producing. The tabloids have been churning out issue after issue speculating as to why Will McAvoy jumped on the first plane to Germany to meet two injured ACN contributors (one of whom is his ex-girlfriend) and MacKenzie knows that… well, they’re not wrong.

As does Charlie, which is why ACN hasn’t released a statement as to why the face of ACN up and left for Landstuhl for an open-ended amount of time, but at least with him churning out segments for the B-block with Elliot at least there’s some sort of professional front for it.  

Although, it should be interesting, getting Sam to keep up her broadcast accent while on muscle relaxants.

Jim’s already giving her shit for it, so hopefully Sammy won’t go full-Kentucky in the middle of a live segment, if only for continuity’s sake. (Although realizing that Will had never heard Sam with her natural accent before walking in on her and Jim in the middle of a debate on the finer points of how Mac almost sold Jim into marriage to secure a source back in ‘08 had been a particularly funny moment.) Which had, as soon as Will had walked into the room with her lunch, turned into Sammy whining about how Will doesn’t have to drop _his_ accent.

“His accent isn’t as broad as yours,” she says, smiling at the man in question and fending off Jim from stealing some of her newly-acquired french fries.

“I have an accent?” he asks, almost panicked. Well, more disturbed than panicked, Mac thinks, but his jaw drops a little bit in the sense that she can tell that his mind is fast-forwarding through about fifteen years of being in front of a camera. A little disturbed. But enough that it’s funny.

(She tries not to laugh. Sam doesn’t bother, burrowed under her thick blanket with only her head showing, body shaking.)

“It’s really only the ‘wh’ sound, anymore.” Which is true, and pretty obvious, although apparently not to Will. It’s not like she’s ever given him notes on it, though, she figures. “And sometimes drops his d’s, and says ‘congress’ like… well, I can’t do it, but not enough that it’s really an issue, except during midterms—”

Jim leans back in the wheelchair, giving the air in front of him a faintly thoughtful look, and Mac knows that Jim’s about to fuck with him. (It’s funny, watching Will try to adapt to the dynamic she, Jim, and Sam had developed in Afghanistan, if only because it makes Jim more of a punk and Sam has rarely, only when it counts, given a shit about what people think about her, a quality that Mac has always admired.)

“Cahn-griss,” Jim muses. “It’s definitely cahn-griss.”

Mac covers up a snort with a well-timed grimace, flicking her eyes back to Will, who has moved onto mouthing specific words.

“Yes, like that.”

 _White House. Congress. Wisconsin. Congress_ , again. “Do I really—no,” he begins, lip curling as he decides to shift gears in his argument. “Murrow had a Midwestern accent.”

“I know, dear.” She pats his arm, not even turning to look at him.

“Murrow is essentially the baseline for news anchors.” He pauses, and reconsiders, flustered. Mac finds herself unable to hide her smile. “Murrow _is_ the baseline for anchors.”

“I _know_ , dear. If it was an issue I would have _told you._ ”

(And then he’s so far gone that he doesn’t even notice that she’s using terms of endearment in front of the subordinates, and while he’s been far from circumspect himself, Will’s generally a little more emotionally reserved than she is, at least in front of others. Or at least tries to be. _Tried to be_ , Mac corrects, biting her lip to tamp down on her smile when he takes her hand off his arm and folds his fingers in between hers.)

“I’ve lived in DC and New York since I was nineteen—”

It makes her uneasy, though. As much as it calms her, keeps her steady, she keeps waiting for some deep, hidden current to drown her as quick and as viciously as a riptide. The neuroinhibitors, the muscle relaxants, the pain medication, Will’s anger, or whatever he feels towards her that is usually more than however much he loves her, all their issues—they’re all keeping the storm at bay, but she knows that it’s all coming back. She was diagnosed with PTSD the last time, before CNN terminated their positions and shipped them back to DC. She knows its coming.

“Sam’s just being difficult,” she tells him, squeezing his fingers.

Will is her lighthouse, but a lighthouse isn’t of much use if you’re already sinking below the waves. And it’s not like she’s… sinking. But she knows that it’s coming. She’d tried to fight it last time, she had, and she’d gotten to shore, to Will, only to send herself out again.

But this time is much, much more.

And if this falls apart again, if she fucks this up again…

She wishes she had just stayed and fought _with_ him, instead of deciding to swim out and find something to fight on her own.

“I am. I am being difficult,” Sam concedes, smiling impishly, albeit with her eyelids faltering, the corners of her lips unable to stay folded into a grin for too long.  

Mac huffs not quite a laugh, but almost a sigh. They need to talk to Charlie. _She_ needs to talk to Charlie. Figure out what she’s doing once she goes back home, because she’s certainly not just going to be sitting around, waiting for her subletter’s lease to be up and then living off of her investments. Or Will, but they haven’t spoken about her first morning here, so she doesn’t dare assume.

(And because maybe, she thinks, if she has other things waiting for her on the shore, she’ll fight harder.

Or at least end up tossed upon the shore by the waves, coughing up saltwater and somehow Will’s EP again, back in Will’s life. But she doesn’t think she has the luck for that to happen a second time. He’s here, he is, and he’s wonderful, her Billy, but the floor’s going to give out on her psychologically, and she’s going to be a huge burden to him. She’s going to be another thing that has happened to him, after his father, his childhood, what she’s already done with Brian, and Genoa, and _leaving him again_.)

“Now get out,” she orders, imperious in a facetious sort of way. She’s too ill to be imperious, in a blue hospital gown and fleece zip-up, tubes and wires littering her sides and limbs, hair long and limp and spit-endy, and she still can’t quite figure out why Will keeps looking at her like she’s the most precious thing he’s ever seen. “ Will and I need to Skype back to New York.”

“Is it is a business call?” Jim asks, helping Sam out of the recliner and easing her down into the wheelchair.

“Would I be kicking you out if it was?” Mac answers, tilting her head.

“Probably,” Jim deadpans.

He’s right, but she tries not to let that show, instead lifting her good arm (the one on the side where the chest drain has already been removed, the one of her right side is scheduled to be taken out tomorrow, thank the Lord) to wave her hand at Sam. “Make sure she doesn’t fall and hit her head getting into bed.”

“Will do.”

 

* * *

 

When Mac answers the call the first thing Sloan sees is that she’s propped up almost entirely by Will. They’re not… she wouldn’t call it _cuddling_ , per se, but Mac’s kind of leaning on half his chest, and his arms aren’t _around her_ , exactly, but Sloan thinks that may be because of all the machines the doctors still have Kenzie hooked up to, but Will is definitely behind and to the side of her. But the way the webcam is set up she can’t see much more than that.

“Don’t you two look cozy,” Charlie says cheerfully.

Will rolls his eyes, but only pulls Kenzie closer.

“Hi Charlie,” Mac says, smiling tiredly, eyes crinkling. “Hi Sloan.”

Mac launches almost immediately into her plans for her return to _News Night_ , and New York City, talking avidly around the fact that her apartment is still rented out for another four months and what’s going to happen to Jim (although, Sloan figures, there can be two Senior Producers working for _News Night_ , and he and Kendra can just split their duties, especially if Mac won’t be truly back on her feet until almost Christmas) and Will just keeps absently brushing his fingers up and down her arm, by habit or by rote, like he can’t stop himself from reassuring himself that she’s there, letting him touch her.

“Sloan, you’ve been doing well at 10 o’clock,” Mac says, slyly.

Will smirks at that. As does Charlie.

Something’s up.

(Besides Will and Mac’s behavior.)

“Wait, what?” Her head whips between the screen and Charlie sitting next to her on the couch in his office. “What don’t I know?”

“You wanna tell her, or should I?” Charlie teases, talking to Will.

“ _What?_ ” Is she getting fired? Or demoted? People are going to have to be shifted around, she knows. They wouldn’t be smiling if it was bad, right?

Will snorts, and Mac elbows him in the ribs. “Ow, okay.”

“Will,” Sloan whines, squirming in her seat.

“Good news, it’s good news,” Mac assures her, casting Will an annoyed glare. “Tell her.”

“Jane Barrow is being released from her contract,” Will finally says, tugging lightly on the end of Mac’s hair. Mac pouts in response, swatting Will’s hand away from her head, but visibly settling when he grabs her hand and moves both of theirs out of frame, and Sloan tries not to focus on that, not when she can call Jim later for an update.

Her head turns back to Charlie. “Released as in…?”

“Fired,” Charlie responds, smirking still.

“Oh.”

“And you will be taking her slot at seven,” Will finishes, smiling. Honest to God smiling, which hasn’t happened in months.

“ _Oh_.”

Mac laughs congenially.

“Wait. What.” This doesn’t make sense. “ _Seriously?_ ” This is… She gives Will a sly smile of her own and eases back into the couch, leaning her elbow on the arm and propping her head up on her chin. “Wait, I’m your lead-in now. Oh, this could be good, William. We could have a Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert type thing, with the split-screen and the banter...”

“No, we couldn’t.”

“That could be cute,” Mac says thoughtfully, leaning her head a bit into Will’s chest.

 _Oh, something is so going on._ Or she hopes. She really, really hopes. She barely spoke to Will in the months after Mac up and left and everyone put together that Will must have _fired her_ , because that was the only way she could be released from her contract without Leona holding her in breach.

Will frowns, although Sloan thinks maybe it’s more of a pout, in the long-run. “I don’t want the public to think I’m cute. I’m supposed to be delivering serious news.”

Mac honest-to-god giggles, and for some reason, Sloan viscerally is transported back to the night that Will, desperate and alone and months after Mac left and refused to answer his emails, came to her, and cried on her shoulder for over half an hour about how he let his life walk away from him. She tries to keep the shadows of the memory off her face, banishing the feeling of his face in her shoulder and his body shaking under her arms.

_They’re together now._

(She couldn’t give him the cold shoulder after that.)

“I want the public to think you’re cute,” Mac teases.

“Why?”

A thought comes to her. “So who’s going to be my EP?”

“Jim.” Mac immediately answers, sidestepping hers and Will’s bickering with ease. “And Kendra will stay with _News Night_ as Senior Producer. Unless you _want_ to keep Zane—”

“Nope, Jim is great.” Zane can be inflicted on whoever ACN decides to give _Market Watch_ to. “Oh my God, what will it be called? What am I going to do?”

“The news,” Will deadpans.

“ _Thank you_ , Will.”

There’s a knock at the door, and both she and Charlie look up to see Maggie poking her head through the doorway, telling Sloan that Don needs to see her for a panel in the D-block. Mac perks up immediately at the sound of Maggie’s voice, and Charlie waves her in.  

She wonders what she’ll have to give Mac to get Maggie on her show…

 

* * *

 

She’s had a bad night, even if it’s only nine, a low thrumming of pain and electric unease keeping her from doing anything but slipping into a light sleep for a few minutes before her body tells her foot needs to kick or her arms need to move. And Will understands the need to get her off the high dose of narcotic as soon as possible, he does, but wishes they would give her something to sleep.

The thoracic surgeon on-call removes the chest drain a little after 10PM, almost a day earlier than expected, but the rest of the night Mac still can’t get comfortable. By 2AM, as the opening strains of the _News Night_ intro music begin to play, he’s moved so he’s sitting behind her, and she’s laying between his legs, leaning back against his chest.

“Sloan will be good. At seven,” she murmurs after a few minutes of watching Elliot introducing the top stories, turning her head so the tip of her nose is against his neck. It’s nothing to drop a kiss on the top of her head, humming in agreement.  

She’s sore, more than he can probably imagine, so he sticks to resting his hands on her hips and curling his thumbs around to her lower back, kneading tense muscles while Elliot segues into Walid al-Moallem acknowledging Syria’s possession of chemical weapons, a silent replay of Mac’s footage of the Syrian military aircraft shelling a Ghouta residential street in the background.

 _This is the most important thing she’s ever done_ , he thinks, pressing his thumbs higher, remembering telling Reese Lansing, on a Manhattan street corner all those years ago, that MacKenzie had reported more real news in one day than he had in his entire career.

“Yeah.”

Will wonders if he should turn the TV off, or at least to another channel, but maybe it’s comforting to her. Syria is standing down. What she did was worth it.

(Not that having sarin gas dropped on you can really be _worth it_ , but at least she’s no longer claiming it’s the universe exacting out irony.)

“And Jim can still sit-in on rundowns. Like Don does. And we can have more cross-network stories. It’ll be good. They’re growing up.” She sounds like she’s finally winding down, and relief takes up a heady position in his chest.

“You did a good job teaching them,” he tells her quietly, dropping another kiss into her hair.

“I shouldn’t have left.” He can hear that she’s trying to remain unemotional, trying to objectively assess her own behavior, but her uneven exhale betrays her; he keeps his hands steady, calmly working out the anxiety where it pools in the muscles planing her back. “I just… Genoa was my fault. And I ran away from it. I ran away _again_.”

“Genoa wasn’t your fault. A _federal judge_ decided. Jerry Dantana doctored the tape, and the rest of us only have our fair shares of the blame. Including you. Especially you. ”

“I should have been there, for depositions and—I know what happened to Maggie, and what you’ve done for her, for all of them, and I just… wasn’t there, I left and let everything fall apart again because I couldn’t face what I’d done.” She takes a slow, measured breath, head falling to the side, giving him access to her temple. “What I _thought_ I had done,” she adds appeasingly.

“I didn’t exactly encourage you to stay. Either time.”

“I could have.”

“And I could have been less of an asshole and actually went to therapy before you left again and gotten my shit together.” She made mistakes, but so had he. And even if the scales had remained in his favor, he _could_ have forgiven her. Guilt and absolution are not a zero sum game, and he could have learned that before chasing her away. “Instead I evened the scales, or so I… thought.” His hands circle around from her back to the tops of her legs, fingers digging into tightly-strung filaments. Should they be discussing this? With her so weak already.

“It’s all right,” she whispers, tilting her chin up to catch a kiss along his jawline.

He swallows hard. “It’s not.”

“No, honey,” she says, softly, almost pleadingly. “It’s _all right_. I… get it. You had to… to survive your father, mentally.” She pauses then, uncertain. “You’re not the only one who had time to think. I know why you couldn’t forgive me, before. But if... if _I’m_ forgivable now, then you are too.”

He breathes out slowly through pursed lips, wishing he had a cigarette, the need for nicotine flaring through his body. “I’m learning. Or, unlearning. Habib calls it...”

“What?”

“I’m trying to unlearn it.”

How many times has Habib been over this with him? How many times had he read MacKenzie’s emails, desperate diatribes to the forced-calm of the weekly emails about her adventures, the shell-shocked recitations of close-calls and the near-misses that weren’t. Funerals. Hospitals. Bodies unrecovered. Her own stabbing, Jim being shot, a producer going missing in the mountains and being sent a video from the Taliban days later, a corpse the week after that. Buildings being shelled and vehicles being upturned by IEDs, marines with legs blown off.

Her frantic explanations about Brian, words that rung too close to his mother’s. _I deserved it. I’m sorry. I deserve all of this. But please, I love you._

And then his weekly appointments, trying to figure out why he hadn’t read her emails (he’d forgive her, because it would make this messy, because he needs someone to blame, because giving an inch is giving his father a mile of forgiveness), why he’d continue to hurt her (because despite everything, he still loved her, and rage is depression turned outwards), why he had paused with his hand on the desk drawer, and lost his nerve (because he hadn’t come to any of these revelations, yet, couldn’t bear to be vulnerable, to have anything less than the emotional upper hand with her.)  

“Besides everything you did wrong, you did everything right. The rest was me,” he says in carefully measured words, learned through finally upturning his own sorrow in hopes of being able to finally being able to be happy. _You never deserved any of this._ “You said… that night, in the hair and makeup, that it was casual at first. Which… I was in love with you from the first moment I heard you in my ear, but I didn’t… there was no way you could have known that. I deliberately didn’t let you know that. It was coffee dates and lunches on the balcony and going back to my apartment under the pretense of work—it was casual, you were right. Because I couldn’t let you in yet, even if I loved you. Because I couldn’t trust myself to not let myself get hurt again. And in the end I let you believe, for four months, that it was just… nothing serious. Because if it wasn’t serious, then if it ended it wouldn’t hurt.”

She laughs, a sound more wet than dry, closer to a sob if not for how it rattled in the back of her throat. “We fucked that up.”

Fear, or panic, mixed incomprehensibly with a long-sought reprieve from their mingled misery, hardens in the back of Will’s throat. “Yeah.”

“I broke up with him three days after you told me that you loved me,” she murmurs, taking both of his hands in hers, tracing the hollows between his fingers. “I ignored his calls, his texts, hiding in bed having panic attack after panic attack and told you I had the flu and not to come over.” She takes a shuddering, shattering, breath, like a wave cresting hard over the sand. “And I knew—I _knew_ , that I loved you. The second you told me… I knew, and I felt like such an idiot for it being a choice, but choosing you, after two years with Brian, who manipulated me, and controlled me, and made stupid rules and made me feel—it was hard. I… you read the emails. I had a lot to _unlearn_. And it took me a long time to realize that he was bad for me. To learn that I didn’t… deserve the way he treated me. But I chose you. And I told him I didn’t want to see him ever again.”

“He—”

“It was a bad relationship,” she says firmly. “And it ended nine years ago.”

But it wasn’t the end. Because men like Brian could never just _let her go_. “And then he started harassing you again.”

MacKenzie sighs. “He called me, when he moved back to New York. I didn’t return his call, but I panicked. I thought that there was a chance, a small chance—I wanted to tell you. You know why. Before someone else did, because I knew if Brian thought he could... And I thought… I thought it was casual. I had no idea you would…”

“Kick you out of my apartment and block your number,” he finishes for her.

He had begged her to _leave_ , and she had, leaving her scattered possessions behind to clutter up his life. When he moved apartments six months after she went to Atlanta he didn’t even go through things—In case he stumbled on some small thing she left behind—just tossed them out. Bought new furniture. A new place.

“You didn’t, at first,” she says delicately, tiredly. He turns her hands over while she speaks, lifting one to his mouth to press a soft kiss to her palm, wrapping his other arm low around her belly. “You were so nice to me. Because we still had to work together. And I kept apologizing, and then you got angry. And then I resigned.”

“I’m sorry I brought Brian to _News Night_.”

“I know you are.” Like it has the past few nights, it seems like she’s getting suddenly pulled under, and he grabs the remote to lower the volume.

“Yeah,” he says, voice low.

“Love you,” she breathes, drifting off.

He traces a hand over her, fingers brushing through hair, over jutted angles and long limbs.

“Love you too.”

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t stay asleep for very long; while her body rests, her mind does not, her brain beseeching daytime anxieties and tending them until the ripple becomes a current rushing to the sea along jagged rocks and steep declines, whitewater nightmares roaring together until she gasps awake, struggling to find which way is up.

(The stars fall, and they all drown.)

 

* * *

 

Drowning has become a welcome experience, if only because she’s acclimated herself to fighting it. But Will is there, immediately setting her to rights.

“It’s only going to get worse,” she says, shaking, a minute later, clenching her fingers in her hair, ignoring the burning pain in her side when she lifts her arm higher than her shoulder. Ignoring the pain, she sits up, pulling away from him, trying to breathe. “It’s only—it’s—”

She tries to calm herself down, well aware she’s probably scaring Will, but her steadying breath turns into a cry on the exhale.

“I can’t take sleeping pills because they give me night terrors. I already have PTSD from the first—from the stabbing.” It all pours out, and she thinks he probably doesn’t know this, or maybe he does, she wrote those fucking emails so fucking long ago and can’t remember what she put in them. “I know where this is going, and it’s going to get worse I don’t—I can’t—I can’t _sleep_ and last time I went back to work too soon, to exhaust myself, it’s going to get worse, it’s already getting _worse_ —”

God, what is _wrong_ with her? Stop it. Stop.

“I’ll be there,” and he’s followed her up, curling around her, burying his face in her hair while trying to hold her without restraining her. “I’ll be there, MacKenzie, for better or for worse.”

She doesn’t deserve it. She’s fair-weather MacKenzie to foul-weather Will, her solid lighthouse who keeps the light on all through the night, all through the storm, until she figures out she needs to come back to him to make any of it make sense. His childhood was brutal storms, and maybe that’s why he’s so good at this, it has to be why he’s so good at this, why he built his foundations deep into the city.

But she—

“I ran away. From all of it,” she chokes out around her own tears, letting the waves swallow her whole. “I didn’t stay, for worse.”

Will’s silent for a long moment, leaving her to the cold winds blowing through her mind, sending her thoughts terrible askew, capsizing in the tumult.

“Would you have stayed?” he asks, voice breaking. “If I had asked you to?”

“Do you think that it was easy for me to leave you?” she counters, barely getting the words out.

The winds coming to a deafening halt, leaving her unsupported but by his arms. He can’t think that it was easy. She made the decision to leave both times rather quickly, yes, but she’s never been one to pause over a question for too long. She left with urgency, and haste, her commitment to exile bound together by grief to the sinking stone of guilt and anger.

She made the decision to leave quickly, both times, but that didn’t make it easy. Despite all her flaws and shallow intricacies and hypocrisies— _it wasn’t easy_ , even if she is, by nature, a runner. But coming back, finding the light on the horizon and heading towards shore… it had already proved _too_ easy. And maybe she resented that, in the end. That it was easy and he wouldn’t have to chase her, wouldn’t have to ask her to stay.

And then he did it, but too late.

Oh, how she had wanted to make a storm of herself.

And look at her now.

“No. I didn’t… you ran away, but I wasn’t—it’s supposed to be good times and bad, MacKenzie. I could have been better, too. You have to stop thinking everything is your fault.” He lays his forehead between her shoulder blades, and MacKenzie, trying to steady the rise and fall of her shoulders, realizes she might not be the only one out to sea. “Please. You came back to _News Night_ in the first place for better or for worse, despite everything. And you stayed, for better or for worse, for all the times I hurt you intentionally. For almost three years, Mac. You stayed. It’s okay that you left. I know why you left. Some of it is my fault.”

He kisses the apex of her where neck meets her back, and she can feel his breath warming the skin not covered by her hospital gown or the sweater that doesn’t irritate the IV ports along her arms, and shivers.

“So I am here, MacKenzie. For worse; for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. I am here.” His voice is tight, and she knows he’s trying to hem in his emotions. Eyes burning, she bites her lip, trying to keep her shoulders from shaking. “The thought of you is what gets me out of bed in morning. Because without you, none of it is worth it. I can’t do this without you. I’ve been chasing you in every way but one the past ten months.” She gives up when she feels him trembling behind her, around her. “Because I need you.”

“I need you too.” She tries to turn in his arms, but can’t in the narrow hospital bed, so he sits up and lays her down, and even though they can’t quite look at each other—because he’s not high and she’s not either, and it isn’t a voicemail or an email—they wind up lying on their sides, facing each other.

Well, he’s lying mostly on his side, her mostly on her back. She doesn’t look at him until his thumb whisks away a tear tracking down her face, and then she realizes, digging her front teeth into her bottom lip, giggling softly, that she’s biting down a smile, not a sob.

“All the days of my life,” he whispers tenderly, eyes red-rimmed. “MacKenzie?”

“Yeah?”

“I brought the ring with me. It’s in the safe in the hotel room. Will you marry me?”

Her response is the first kiss they share in seven years.

 

* * *

 

For a week, they have fair winds and calm seas; on day seventeen they are married.

 

* * *

 

Jim mindlessly taps his fingers on his laptop, listening to Don telling Elliot to wrap it up. He knows getting Will and Sam back on the air has boosted the numbers (as have the hundreds, by now, of tabloid stories depicting just how Will rushed to MacKenzie’s bedside, casting them as star-crossed lovers torn apart by Jerry Dantana in a cruel twist of fate, which Jim thinks Maggie is making a scrapbook of for Mac to laugh at when she returns to New York in a few weeks) but he really just wants to _go home_.

Not that he’s exactly complaining about the all-expenses paid presidential suite AWM is providing them to broadcast from, but Jim doesn’t speak German.

(Which made shopping for Will’s wedding ring for Mac an interesting experience, until he remembered that Lady McHale can speak German. Well, that was certainly an interesting experience too, but in an infinitely less frustrating way. Especially since, he found out later, it gave the Ambassador the cover to give Will the shovel talk. Or whatever the Ambassadorial equivalent of that is, since Sir Edward McHale has access to a lot more than just a shovel.)

Sam gives Elliot one last response to Obama’s promise of military intervention—something on Russian Cold War policy and proxy wars and neo imperialism that Will agrees with but lets Sam handle because she has the phD in the subject, before they sign off together.

By the end of the show forty minutes later, Will’s already back in Mac’s hospital room, which leaves Jim and Sam alone to sink into couches, exhausted but not ready to be alone. The same thing that keeps driving Will back to Mac’s beside keeps them on the couches night after night, falling asleep to the TV on low volume.

(It’s easier to brave the storm with someone. And even though he doesn’t love Sam the way Will loves Mac, they were the first among Mac’s proteges. They cleave together.)

Jim smiles groggily (and Sam snores softly on her end of the couch) when at the end of the broadcast, Elliot, with a beaming Sloan next to him at the desk, doesn’t immediately sign off.

 

* * *

 

“We are overjoyed to announce that earlier today, Will McAvoy and _News Night_ Executive Producer MacKenzie McHale were wed by the chaplain at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in the bride’s hospital room. The ceremony was attended by the bride’s parents, as well as the current _News Night_ Executive Producer Jim Harper and ACN contributor Samantha Hahn.

“Their ACN family back home couldn’t be happier for them.

“This is Elliot Hirsch filling in for Will McAvoy on _News Night_. Up next is Terry Smith with _Capitol Report._ Thanks for watching. Good night.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	4. Back to the Wall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** So, as you've probably noticed (or not) this will now have five parts, instead of four. Mostly because everyone talks too much and pacing got weird and I would have had to cut a lot to make it all fit and that felt wrong so I decided to end Part IV where it ends and turn the rest into a Part V which you should hopefully be getting sometime in the next week, since a lot of it is already written. 
> 
> Thanks per usual to Meg (fredesrojo) for putting up with my generally incoherent rambling at strange hours of the morning.
> 
>  **TW:** References to past abuse.

_And if I catch myself crying_  
 _For things I cannot control_  
 _I'll head on back to the wall_  
 _Where tears are invisible._

* * *

 

He’s always been a light sleeper.

Well, not always, Mac supposes.

She doubts Will was _born_ with an inability to sleep around other people, but that it was rather a trait accrued over time as a survival instinct, and the lingering anxiety over allowing himself to be that vulnerable in front of other people (or maybe not quite that, Mac thinks, but rather that he’s always deigned himself to be the protector, the one taking watch) has kept him awake for decades.

It’s funny how much she remembers—what noises will wake him up (she has to close doors quietly or not at all, keep the TV on low, her cell phone on vibrate) and how to keep him from waking up (if she rubs circles in his lower back, trails her fingers over the crease of neck and shoulder), how if he sleeps through the night, and sleeps well, she’ll wake up with his face pressed into her shoulder, or her chest, or her stomach.

Which is why it’s nice, she supposes, in a way that’s both somewhat sad and somewhat sweet, that he can fall asleep while she’s still up reading, trying to get her mind to shut down enough to grab a couple of hours of sleep. Fall asleep next to her, or on more than one occasion, with his arms around her waist and his face pressed into her abdomen while she’s lying back on her mountain of pillows, her fingers combing through his hair.

(He barely slept the entire time she was in the hospital. The week spent in the hotel suite following her discharge and awaiting her clearance for travel mostly involved her resting, and him sleeping. It was settling, Mac thinks. She’s settled. And it’s the stupid little things, like sharing a bed with him and being able to touch his hair and hold his hand, little affections she’s been starved of for seven years, that make it settled.  A grand declaration of love was what she got, but it was never what she’s needed. She’s only ever needed Will.)

He doesn’t sleep on the plane.

She sleeps almost the entire time. Its equal parts a predicated relief and the exhalation of a breath that’s been burning up her lungs for seven years and Vicodin and perhaps more than an equal part of how easily she settles against him, a relearned choreography of interlocking limbs.

Although, Mac thinks, that too just might be relief; they still fit.

They leave Germany on September 16, 2013, on the ninth day of their marriage, on a private plane provided by AWM.

She’s run for 8,837 miles.

The staff is discretionary enough to not make a show of her final 3,381 miles home. It’s only Charlie, Sloan, and Don there to meet them at the gate, and so she’s not so self-conscious about leaning heavily on Will (she’ll need crutches, the forearm kind, until her muscle control is completely back, but for now she’ll just lean on her husband) in front of them. She goes to Charlie first, sighing happily into his careful embrace.

Next is Sloan, who examines her at arm’s length ( _we’ve Skyped ten times, Sloan_ ) before pulling her into a tight hug and eventually (and reluctantly) passing her off to Don, who just smirks before hiding an actual smile in her hair.

“Only you two could go from estranged to engaged to married in two and a half weeks.”

She snorts. “Feels a little crazy?”

“Nah,” Don answers. Hearing Sloan behind them accosting Will, they both laugh. Mac sighs into his shoulder, hugging him more tightly. “Works for you guys.”

“Yeah.” They fit. They all fit. Her and Don; he’s always understood. The guilt, the impulse to use it as a crutch. She thinks, maybe, they’re both beyond it now. That Don’s been beyond it for a while.

She wasn’t just running from Will, and Genoa. She was running from all of it, _fitting._ Mac’s never quite _fit_ , has always acted the young girl eavesdropping on her father’s conversations with important people. Important men. Always peering around the corner, waiting to be shooed off for wanting too much, hurried back to bed. Always ready to run back up the stairs, hide under her covers.

Will has always been the center, trying to keep her running and hiding.

But she knows she left behind more than that.

(She can be the center, too. If she chooses. Somehow, without her noticing, she’s become the one having the important conversations. But being the center means staying. And settling. And letting go of her emotional bullshit.

She wants to, this time. Had the last time, too; signed a three-year contract, and was prepared to wait it out. But, she takes pains to remind herself, it’s different this time. There are rings placed upon fingers and a license, signed and noted, and vows taken, and they did that for a reason, because she’ll need it. Because they’ll both need it. Because neither of them have ever had much security in settling.

And because, if she’s already his wife, she won’t feel as guilty when she starts to drown again. And she—she has to stop feeling guilty, all of the fucking time. Unlearn it.)

“It does,” she whispers.  

He clears his throat. “Besides, now the tabloids can’t claim it was a shotgun wedding. Win-win.”

“ _Don_ ,” she admonishes half-heartedly, with more of a smile than anything really enforceable, pulling back to kiss him on the cheek.

“I don’t know if this station could endure a bump watch,” he says, very serious about it all, before quirking a crooked grin. “Maggie’s making a scrapbook of the media coverage. It’s very Dadaist. And funny.”

“Hey, don’t make fun. She was in the scrapbooking club at Mizzou.” And then she wonders if Don even knows what Dada is. She lifts an eyebrow at him. “Dada?”

He shrugs, smiling. “I don’t know.” 

 

* * *

 

Don whispers something into Mac’s ear that makes her laugh and brush her lips against his cheek. Will’s flagging pretty hard (and doesn’t want to even try to do the math to figure out how long he’s been awake, what with the time changes) but he doesn’t want Mac to be shorted her reunion with her friends.

Their friends.

Whatever.

(Sam and Jim and the rest of Mac’s Syria team has already been home for a few days, so it was just the two of them, which was nice, even if it was just Mac drooling on his leg for six hours. No that she’ll ever admit to drooling in her sleep.)

He slips his phone into his pocket after shooting a Maggie a quick text (like he’d promised) that they’ve landed, startling slightly when Mac slides back in under his arm, smiling up at him. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

That should probably be the other way around.

“I’m fine.”

She sighs.

“You’re falling asleep standing up.” He is not. She rolls her eyes up at him before correcting herself. “Well, trying very hard not to.”

He only realizes when she’s waking him that he’s slept on her shoulder on the car ride home. Their home. Well, his apartment. Their home for now. Will’s been thinking, and has only vaguely broached the topic with her, because, well, _priorities_ , that they should buy a place of their own that isn’t his somewhat cold and clinical bachelor pad. If only because Mac deserves a place that is at least half of her own choosing. And because he thinks he’d like that, too. The sharing of it.

She grabs her carry-on and he manages to sling their minimal luggage (she didn’t need much in the hospital, and just seemed content stealing the clothes he had bought over in Germany after she was discharged) over his shoulder without any real exhaustion-induced delay. Mac grabs his hand and shuffles him in through the lobby and into the elevator.

“We need to get your stuff out of storage,” he mumbles, scrubbing a hand over his face. _Clothes. She’ll probably want her own clothes._ Obviously not her work stuff yet, or her sky-high heels for… quite a while, but she obviously owns clothing besides that that she left behind. Most of the things her assistant, that Meg girl, had brought to Germany were ratty tee shirts and cargo pants and combat boots. Nothing Mac will want to wear around the apartment. She can steal whatever she wants from him, but he thinks she’ll want her own things to wear for whenever she eventually feels up to having company.

And he wants MacKenzie to start cluttering up his life again.

She squeezes his fingers.

“It can wait a bit; the key is in my safety deposit box. I need to update the paperwork so your name is on it.” Adjusting the strap of her bag over her shoulder, she leans into him. “Unless we should just join our accounts. Might be easier.”

He nods, yawning. “I want your name on all the accounts, but I don’t think it matters which bank we use. But yeah, there’s no real reason to keep our finances separate. I’ll send someone to get the paperwork for you later this week. Scott can handle it.”

“I’ll start thinking about what needs to come out of storage. I had mostly everything well-sorted, since I rented my apartment out as fully-furnished.” She sighs, mostly as filler than anything else. “What kind of mattress do you have?”

“A nice one.” He thinks it’s probably a pillow top? He liked it. He bought it. “Buy whatever you want, though.”

“You’re the one with the bad back,” she counters.

Struggling to stay awake, he scoffs at that. “Says the woman who just left a warzone. You haven’t slept in a real bed for almost a year.”

“The hotel had a real bed.” She pauses, tilting her chin up to watch the numbers indicating floor number go up and up. “I need to get paperwork from the DMV.”

“Why?”

She looks at him, a bit incredulous. “To change my name.”

Fatigued as he is, that makes him snap back to attention.

“Wait, really?”

The last woman he’d known to be Mrs. McAvoy had only garnered sorrow from the name.

Not that he doesn’t want her… if _she_ wants to. He had just assumed that she wouldn’t? Mac’s been in journalism for almost twenty years now. He… he just… okay.

He tries to not tighten his fingers around hers.  

MacKenzie snorts indelicately, either missing his reaction or mistaking it as exhaustion. “I don’t think you fully understand how long I waited to marry you. It’s like trophy at this point. Or a ribbon.” She laughs a little at herself, and he feels a surge of affection for her. “At least legally. Professionally I’ll probably keep McHale. Although your name is just as prominent as mine.” She looks up at him (he’d almost forgotten, how much shorter than him she is when she isn’t in heels), smiling sweetly, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “Besides, I’d like to be _your_ Mrs. McAvoy.”

The elevator reaching their floor saves him from having to react beyond leaning down to kiss her on the lips.

“Forgive me for not carrying you across the threshold,” he says, letting her step first into the entryway.

“You’d trip,” she retorts, shoving the luggage strap off his shoulder and shaking the bag to the floor before more gently placing her own things down.

“Hey!”

She gives him a distinct sort of expression that mostly says _oh please_ but he thinks might be a little fond, as well. Well, he more than thinks that. He has rather conclusive evidence that Mac is more than fond of him.

“You can’t put on a pair of pants without falling over.”

“That’s different!” he exclaims feebly, letting her tug him along to the bedroom. Toothbrushes. Does he have extras? Probably. His housekeeper is good about that. The fridge should have food in it, so they don’t have to worry about that, and…

“How, exactly?”

He blinks blearily down at her. “Different body parts.”

Rolling her eyes, she puts her hand on his chest and pushes him down onto the bed and sets to unbuttoning his shirt. She lifts up one of his hands, and then the other, undoing his cuffs. Wait, isn’t this supposed to be happening the other way around? With him undressing her? He’s pretty certain that’s how it’s been going the past month.

“I think carrying someone involves your legs, you daft—”

“Center of gravity is different.”

She stops trying to get his shirt off his shoulders, putting her hands on her hips and raising her eyebrows at him. “So are you telling me that you have plenty of experience with carrying women across thresholds?”

“Not in particular, no,” he answers, pouting. Well, not pouting. He doesn’t pout. He’s fifty goddamn years old. He shrugs off the button down and tosses it to the floor.

“Besides, you’ve carried me plenty,” she grumbles, before biting her lower lip to hide a smile. God, he loves her. “Come on, to bed with us.”

“Shirts are—”

She’s already off and, well, kind of limping into his walk-in closet, flipping on the light switch and he can hear her rummaging through things.

“I know where they are, Billy. You’re hardly a creature of change,” she responds. “Also, I’m going to need a solid two-thirds of your closet.” She hesitates, and he can practically see her sizing up the space. “Probably more.”

“I can use the one in the guest room,” he answers, somewhat hopelessly trying to get his shoes off.  

 _Or_ , they could just buy a place with _two_ closets in the master suite. But he can think more about that tomorrow, Will thinks. Or later this week. He’ll make a note to get his business manager to get in touch with a real estate agent.

Mac comes back out with an armful of clothes, tossing some of them onto the bed next to him.

“Arms up,” she orders, pinching her fingers into the shoulders of his tee shirt. His arms feel heavy, but he can do this himself, he thinks, half-glaring at her. She rolls her eyes, exasperated. “What? You’ve done this before.”

“Not since I was five.”

(He’s somewhat aware of the fact that he’s whining. And that his eyes keep falling closed regardless of his stalwart attempt to keep them open.)

She grabs the bottom hem of his shirt and starts rolling it up. “Do I need to remind you of the night, well, very early morning after 2006 News and Documentary Emmys? Arms up.”

He finally complies, letting her lift the shirt over the top of his hand, feeling his shoulders relax when she combs her fingers through his hair, smoothing it back into place even though he’s going to fall asleep the second his head hits the pillow. “Hey, that was a good night.”

It had been. _News Night_ had won three categories and he discovered how stunning Mac looks in Dior, even if she let him handle the spotlight.

“Well, yes, but I referring to how drunk you were by the time we got back to your place.”

He wasn’t _that_ bad. He thinks. He doesn’t actually remember much from that night. But that might just be how fucking tired he is _now_.

“I—”

She somehow has his pants unbuttoned and unzipped and him down on his back without him exactly aware of it, tugging off his jeans and dropping them onto the floor, stooping to pick up his BlackBerry and place it on his nightstand.

“Oh, shut it.” She strips quickly herself, plopping down onto the bed beside him to drop one of his tee shirts over her head and to kick off her yoga pants before pushing off the mattress to stand up again. “I’m going to wash up and then I’ll be back. Under the covers.”

Groaning, he settles into familiar sheets.

“Oh, and you have a new text from Maggie.”

He reaches out blindly for his phone, taking a few tries to enter the lock code so he can read the message.

_Good. But now I insist on a moratorium on members of this newsfamily going to foreign countries FOR OUR OWN HEALTH AND SANITY._

Laughing, if only because it’s far too true and because Maggie is the only person who can really get away saying that kind of thing, Will rolls towards the center of the mattress. By the time MacKenzie pulls his arms around her a few minutes later, he’s already asleep.

 

* * *

 

How easily they slip into a routine is encouraging, if only because very little else in their lives right now is easy.

Will works from 11 AM to 9 PM, Monday through Friday, rarely lingering after broadcast. She has physical therapy twice a week, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and sees her old psychiatrist on Monday and Friday afternoons. The rest of the time she’s backhandedly working on _News Night_ from home and sorting through the boxes of her shit brought over from storage, even though it seems a bit futile, since they’ll be moving next year.

(That’s the current timeline, at least. She should be back on her feet by Halloween and back to work full time by Thanksgiving. And then the holidays will be crazy, since both their families are clamoring to come visit, and they’ll start looking for a place come January.)

This goes on for weeks without much deviation, September giving way to a dreary, water-logged October.

Mac returns from a therapy session on October 9th a little after 4:30 PM entirely worn out, crawls into bed, and only wakes hours later to Will rubbing circles into her back.

Will touching her in bed is half the reason she’s so fucked up. Well, no. That’s a deliberate misrepresentation of the facts. She’s fucked up because she can’t fuck. Not, well, she knows it’s not a physiological problem, because they’ve gotten started a few times, and then some dark corner of her mind starts sounding alarm bells about letting herself let go of control and suddenly the idea of letting Will fuck her until her legs are numb and her eyes squeeze shut and she has trouble breathing is somewhat terrifying and she can’t do it. Any of it.

And Will is being immensely sweet about it all, which her $400 an hour shrink has gotten her to come around on not feeling guilty about, that he’s her husband, it’s in the contract, he loves her…

(Okay, coming around on that has actually improved her mental health an incredible amount, MacKenzie won’t downplay that.)

And she _wants to_ , or well, now she’s half-afraid to even try, since it hasn’t worked, and they’re taking it slow, but she _misses it._ She misses sex with Will. Not that there aren’t other intimacies, of course, but she…

Yeah.

(To be honest, she can’t even get herself off.)  

Dr. Laura Eisenberg, a brash willowy woman in her mid-thirties who holds hours while in an old Columbia College of Physicians sweatshirt and jeans, says that it’s completely normal, that she’s trying to regain some sliver of control over what the sarin did to her nervous system, the first, hazy week that’s just a blur of painful convulsions and Will’s gentle attempts to calm them, and now her mind has conflated Will touching her to her brain sending messages from nowhere to nowhere and this just fucking sucks, but Mac’s pretty determined to work through it.

(Not that she’s going to _tell_ Will why this is happening, just that it’s related to sarin. She doesn’t need him to feel more guilty.

She _does_ need to remind him that Habib has changed his regular Wednesday appointments to Saturdays now so that he can spend the mornings with her and God knows she won’t wake up early enough to get him out of bed for them.

And she’s not a complete idiot; she knows Will watched the footage. Expecting him to be just fine would be idiotic. And selfish. She’s not overreacting, and she can feel that way without assuming guilt.)

“Hey,” he murmurs.

Turning onto her back with a squeaking yawn, she realizes she’s slept for at least five hours. Which is more than she’s been getting at night. Which, consequently, is more than what Will’s been getting at night, since he wakes up whenever she wakes up.

_Fuck._

“Hi honey.”

“Bad day?”

Well, saying _yes_ wouldn’t entirely be a lie, but she’d rather not get into it. Something in her facial expression must say yes, though, because when she leans up onto her elbows he catches her chin on the backs of two fingers and coaxes a soft kiss from her lips.

“Hungry?” he asks, after pulling away.

She doesn’t let him go quite yet, chasing his mouth to nibble on his lower lip. So much of her muscle memory has been swept out to sea without any sort of lingering trace to prove that it ever existed at all, but at least she remembers how Will likes to be kissed.

“Yes.”

Bypassing the crutch propped up against the side of the bed, he gently pulls her to her feet and she grips his forearms, trying to find her balance, combating the muscle weakness that’s still dogging her, keeping her in bed in the mornings for longer than she’d like and less secure in walking even though she knows the longer she stays sitting the worse it will get.

Sliding her palms down along his forearms to his wrists and beyond, she locks her fingers around his hands, letting him take some of her weight.

“You know we’re not supposed to do this.”

Her physical therapist has been rather adamant about eschewing her tendency to use Will as her crutch, if only because he takes on more of her weight than he should.

“You had a bad day,” he counters, smirking, starting to walk backwards slowly. It’s almost like dancing, and he’s leading them even though he’s the one moving backwards, and she’s never been too much of a good dancer anyway, but his mother taught him when he was young, so it’s almost like second nature to him, in a way, like dancing his mother around in circles on the kitchen floor.

(He speaks very little about the woman who had been named Rosemary McAvoy, which Mac knows means that he loves his mother too much to find words for her, is unable to pin her down with speech.

But the night after her new driver’s license came, he told her a few things about the woman she now shares a profession with; that she was six months pregnant when she graduated high school, and was kicked out of her house and was forced to marry her baby’s father, and the baby was Will, who was born when she would have been starting at the dance conservatory she had been accepted to. Rosemary, who loved music and dancing and theater, who was abandoned by her parents and her siblings.

Rosemary, who taught Will how to dance and only accepted John back into the house _once_ after finally getting the support to kick him out, after John had completed his first round of rehab, after Will broke the bottle across his face and the police were finally forced to pay proper due to what happened in the farmhouse on the road outside a town outside of Lincoln. Rosemary, who filed for divorce when Will was fourteen and hit his first growth spurt and was growing into too much of a man for John to contend with, Will who had become a threat and had learned to hit back hard.

But for what little MacKenzie knows about Rosemary McAvoy she knows even less about John. She knows that he was cruel, and that the last time Will saw his father, as tornado sirens rang through the autumn air, Will was trying to kill him.

She knows that Will worries that he’s inherited more than just his father’s build.)

MacKenzie likes to dance with her husband.

He leads her into the kitchen, and when he lifts her up onto the counter she kisses the tip of his nose before, more confidently than she truly feels at the moment, ordering him to make her dinner.

Twirling pasta around her fork thirty minutes later, she learns that the 40th floor wants them to do a special report on the attack on Ghouta. They spend most of the night—chilly, but not unbearably so, and dry—wrapped up together on the terrace, talking around the fact that _their_ story is tangled up in it all, that full disclosure will include all the mistakes that tripped between Genoa and Ghouta and the email is on the record, of course, and Wade Campbell, and _The Greater Fool_ article and Brian Brenner, proof that the two of them have never had much luck with compartmentalizing.

Will quit smoking in the two weeks during which he rarely left her side except to sleep and shower; they stay curled up under layers of thick blankets until their breath turns to grey mist that curls up into the bleak night city sky. 

 

* * *

 

Jim asks Maggie along to Will and Mac’s on Saturday, October 26th.

 

* * *

 

She’s seen Mac since she’s come home, of course—Mac has dropped by the newsroom a couple of times on the weekends, generally with Will but sometimes with Charlie or Sloan or Jim, never staying more than an hour or two.

Seeing Mac and Will as a couple (married couple, Maggie thinks there’s still a bit of whiplash there, seeing rings on both of their fingers and knowing that Mac’s driver’s license now says MacKenzie McAvoy, something that Maggie only knows because HR needed a copy of it for insurance purposes and while she’s now a Senior Producer sometimes Maggie slips back into being Will’s assistant because he’s tired and a bit distracted, even if he’s happier) is strange, even if they aren’t that different. Calmer, Maggie thinks. They touch a lot, fingers brushing elbows and wrists and shoulders, little things that are cursory without being perfunctory. Sweet, if nothing else, like they’re reminding themselves and each other that they’re there.

But still trade venomless barbs. And Maggie thinks that everyone has learned that Will is ticklish, if only because poking him in the ribs is Mac’s preferred method of getting him to stop doing whatever is annoying her. And that Will tugs on the ends of Mac’s hair whenever she gets on a bit of a tangent.

They’re even more… whatever the word is for it, at home. Which makes sense.

The contrast between Will’s apartment a few months ago and what Maggie supposes should be now classified as Will and Mac’s apartment is startling. In a singularly good way, since Will’s apartment (which she’s seen a lot of in the past year, since even tabloid reporters know that Will McAvoy could never be fucking his former assistant, and since Will sometimes had to be scraped off his terrace and prodded into eating and Maggie remembers his sisters’ telephone numbers well enough and Liz and Fiona were always rather fond of her so her threats of calling in reinforcements were rather credible) was kind of sad.

Will’s grumbling about letting Jim and Maggie go to 7 o’clock with Sloan, which has Mac rolling her eyes from her throne-like position on the couch. “Jim was her age when I brought him on as _News Night_ ’s Senior Producer. It’s time for Maggie to _leave the nest_. And Jim is older than I was when I started as your EP. And when we started dating… oh God, that’s a trip.”

“How old were you when you were first hired as a Senior Producer?” Maggie asks from her position on one of the rugs that Maggie is fairly certain are Mac’s doing, scribbling notes into the margins of one of the proposals for the special broadcast, frowning at the ridiculous spread of paper on the coffee table she’s been using as her _ad hoc_ desk for most of the morning.

“Twenty-six,” Mac answers, tucking her feet up under her.

“How old were you when you became an EP?”

“After my first Peabody.” Mac smiles fondly, taking a long sip of the coffee Will’s just handed her. Maggie nods her thanks up to him when he places a mug next to her right hand. “I covered the hostage crisis in Beslan in September ’04,” she says by way of explanation, even though Will and Jim obviously already know the story. “I was already in Athens for the Olympics with NBC and they shipped me over since I had spent eighteen months after graduate school covering the Chechen War. So… twenty-nine.”

“Was your first EP gig _News Night_?”

Will snorts derisively.

Mac ignores him. “Technically no.”

“Technically?”

Jim starts laughing from the dining room, and attempts to disguise it as a cough.

Mac bites down a smile. “Will gets tetchy about that.”

“Ed Marsh,” Will grumbles.

Maggie faintly remembers talk of an old feud between Will and the retired anchor. She feels the corners of her lips lift into a smile entirely of their own accord. “Wait, so Will’s thing with Ed Marsh is over you?”

Mac smiles in a kind of self-satisfied-but-still-mildly-exasperated sort of way, waving her off, and Maggie can tell that it’s a story for another time.

“For the sake of this conversation _not_ going down the rabbit hole, let’s just say that _yes, News Night_ was the first show I EP’d for, so that Will can cling to the belief that my tenure as the best Executive Producer in the business begins and ends with him.” Placing her coffee down onto the table, she picks up the next file of reports to go through, eyes trailing Will as he crosses from the kitchen to sit down next to her on the couch. “And you, Maggie, will ignore Will and go to 7 o’clock with Sloan.”

Will frowns. “Managing. Editor.”

“No, because you thought her name was _Ellen_ for six months until _I_ promoted her to Assistant Producer, so she needs my blessing, not yours, and I think we should reward her stunning loyalty to _News Night_ by _letting her go_.” Mac absently prods him in the middle, and Jim, walking by to go to the kitchen for a refill, snorts loudly when Will squirms. “Besides, you can still see her. She’s not _actually_ going anywhere.”

“7 o’clock!” he protests.

“My God, man. To Sloan! Not the Soviets!” Maggie almost laughs. And Sloan thought that _Mac_ would be the problem in this transaction. “Ignore him. He doesn’t like that you’re all growing up. You produced the segments for Ghouta wonderfully, Maggie. And you’re going to be wonderful at seven. And you know you can always come visit. _Right_ , honey?”

Will grumbles his agreement, although Maggie can see the small smile he’s hiding behind the rim of his cup of coffee.  

 

* * *

 

Mac starts again part-time in early November, coming in three or four times a week in the afternoon and staying through through the end of broadcast.

(Will having Mac in his ear again makes _all_ of their lives easier.)

Planning the broadcast on Syria (pre-taped, more casual, since most of ACN’s reporters on the ground aren’t the on-air talent, anchored by Elliot and Sloan since it’s been decided that Sam and Will are too wrapped up in what actually happened to interview anyone and should be interviewed, although the debate rages on how much of the human interest side of Ghouta—Will and Mac’s marriage—should be included) has somehow turned into Sunday dinners at Will and Mac’s apartment.

Which has also somehow turned into the proposal of a Dayside versus Primetime softball game, which Charlie thinks is hilarious, and which also, in turn, leads to a fierce competition between Will and Jenna over who is the better pitcher.

No one mentions the word _Genoa._

Or the calamity that the day after Election Night had revealed.

Or the fact that damn near exactly one year ago, Mac strode out of the newsroom for what everyone was terrified would be the last time, fleeing the wreck of her relationship with Will and her professional life, throwing herself into something bigger and more dangerous than the Dantana suit to keep herself from drowning completely.

And Jim laughs to himself, remembering Will’s comments almost three years ago about the staff invading his apartment for the first anniversary party, now watching Will and Mac at the head of their overly-crowded dining room table, verbally elbowing each other out of the way to tell a story about their first journalist fuck up at the helm of _News Night_ back in 2005 to their visibly-amused senior staff.

They’re happy.

They’re all happy.

And have finally stopped running.

(Not that they’re quite done yet, just because they stopped running away from each other. It’s never quite as simple as that, Jim thinks. But it’s a start.) 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	5. Under the Waves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Well, this is it! (Except for the epilogue, which I wound up writing despite myself.) I hope you enjoyed it! Thanks to everyone who commented and gave kudos along the way. And a big thanks to Meg for holding my hand during the difficult bits and prodding me to get back to writing. 
> 
> As a note, I am working on a very fluffy version of this where Mac comes home _before_ having sarin dropped on her, because I like this plot device too much to fully leave it behind. So that will appear at some point in the future.

_Under the waves, I know who I am_   
_I don't need to spin the story._   
_Under the waves, down in the deep_   
_I no longer see the rings of rain.  
_

 

* * *

  
The special broadcast on the sarin attack is taped on a Friday in early December, a few weeks after Mac is set to return to work full time. (New Years is the goal, since Sloan’s show will be starting the first business day of 2014.) She works herself into exhaustion, and Jim watches old habits repeating, even if she catches herself every so often, forces herself to put down a file or walk away from her office. And Will has her out the door by ten every evening every day she comes in at the latest, if only because he can’t really stop her from being in by 9:30 in the morning.

They schedule it on a Friday because they know they’ll need to weekend to recover. Mac agreed easily, and how quickly she acquiesced to her own limitations keeps Jim from lingering at her side for too long, his own habits dying hard.

She hasn’t failed any psych evaluations. There aren’t any Taliban fighters in New York City. She has Will this time. She’s not going to run away, she’s not overly taking the blame, she’s going to counseling.

And she and Will have a new apartment, which they’re by turns excited about and kicking themselves over, because as Mac grumbled one morning it was apparently ahead of schedule, and then bit back a smile, explaining that she and Will had gone with the real estate agent on a whim early in November, and then when she fell in love with their new penthouse on Madison Avenue, he immediately knocked out the other bid that had been put in and a week later, it was theirs.

(It’s a fucking nice place, with 1300 square feet of terrace that wraps around the entire thing and Mac’s already threatening to throw a party on once it gets warm enough. Three bedrooms, and floor-to-ceiling french windows which Jim knows nothing about but okay, and it’s pre war? Which means something.

It’s nice. He’s been there four or five times. It’s a block from the park. And across the street from a Dean & DeLucas, and putting two combative perfectionists with time on their hands together in one penthouse with a nice kitchen and across the street from a gourmet foodstore will apparently turn into some strange form of one-upmanship about dinner.

Which they’re all reaping the benefits of, to be honest.)

Although now Mac needs to file again for another driver’s license. Which she is less than amused about, but at least she has an assistant now to handle that kind of shit.

(It’s Charlie’s doing. And probably Will’s doing, too. Meg. Whose job mostly consists of, per Mac’s instructions, putting together reports and briefing memos and keeping Will from hovering in her office during most hours of the business day. Which has been to the amusement of many of the senior staff. Mostly to Sloan, who has retained the walk-in privileges that Will has not.)

And the resulting grab for the furniture that wouldn’t make the cut to the new place had involved a rather tense game of rock-paper-scissors over Will’s old bedframe between Gary and Martin while he himself walked out unnoticed with a duplicate espresso machine. Well, not entirely unnoticed. Maggie was also smuggling something out, but both had turned a blind eye to the other’s attempt at quietly making off with an expensive appliance.

Sam’s already bought up Mac’s old place, which she can afford with her new foreign correspondent’s salary.

So, things are… good.

Or, at least Jim knows they could be substantially worse.

He follows Mac closely anyway, maybe for his own sake.  


 

* * *

  
She asks Neal to merge her email accounts together. And it’s not like she’s forgotten that Will had emailed her while she was away, she just didn’t expect him to be so _prolific_ about it. The unread emails in her old account totals in the thousands, and—or so she sees, once she sorts it out to just the ones from his account—228 are from Will.

Her office isn’t ready yet (meaning that she hasn’t entirely kicked Jim out of it yet, since they’re still setting up Sloan’s show, now titled _Starting Point with Sloan Sabbith_ , and after ten months without an office she’s fine working wherever for the time being until she’s back to work entirely) for full time use and so she’s on her laptop in Will’s office.

He’s not in yet.

No one’s really in yet, except for Jim and Maggie, who are producing the Syria broadcast. It’s early, even for her, and she left her husband (she smiles to herself) still half-asleep in bed when she skirted out of their apartment a little after 8 o’clock.

(Will’s never been good at waking up in an expedient fashion.)

It’s going to be a bit of a day, she thinks.

Maybe she could read _one_.

Frowning slightly, she pushes her glasses further up the bridge of her nose and scans the subject lines.

Reply after reply after reply… and she realizes that when Will said that he read her emails, he also _answered_ them. Those weren’t… written at a good time of her life. Stretches of time that she’s almost blocked out entirely, to be honest, now slowly trying to work them over with her therapist and dredge up the old pain without paralyzing herself entirely and leaving herself to drown once more.

Okay.

_One._

She can read one.

It’s Will, and she’s at a place (with herself, with him, with them) that she can handle this.

**To:** wdmcavoy@acn.com  
 **From:** mmchale@cnn.com  
 **Subject:** I know you're not reading these

_I don't know why I keep sending them. You've probably changed your email or blocked me or had some poor assistant of yours set it so that anything from my address gets funneled straight into the trash. I just..._

_I was stabbed. I'm in Landstuhl. You already know this. I'm not assuming here, Charlie told me he told you. I'm glad you can be indifferent about me? At least you have that. I get worried about how angry you can be. It's not good for you. And now I'm chained to a bed in Landstuhl and... I have nothing to do but stare at the ceiling tiles and watch TV in German, which you know is my fifth language, so I'm mostly staring blankly at the screen._

_I watched News Night yesterday, which only makes me more worried. I think you've stopped going to therapy. This isn't you. And I just... I'm lying here, alone, and stoned out of my mind, and I'm starting to think this is what rock bottom is. I can't run. Physically, or emotionally, anymore. I can't run from you, or all these things that I've done. And I'm on my knees. Face in the dirt. I suppose it's time to find out what's left. Let whatever idea of myself that I've held die. Try to heal._

_It was an accident. I know I was reckless, but it was an accident. I know you always hated how I never thought of consequences..._

_I know you're not reading these, but I wish you'd take care of yourself. You're probably doing a good job of convincing everyone else that you are. But I was in your ear for almost two years, Will. I watched you through the monitor. And watching you last night... you're not okay._

— _M_

_[email sent on 11/08/09 from 1.18.25.3668 at 8:32 PM CET]_

**To:** mmchale@acn.com  
 **From:** wdmcavoy@acn.com  
 **Subject: RE:** I know you're not reading these

_No, poor Maggie never quite figured out how to make your emails disappear. And I was too deep in denial to admit why I didn't want to change my email address (as I'm certain you've done by now, and I don't know... why I keep replying to these, if only because I can't sleep at night and I think of you anyway so at least I feel less crazy if I'm writing to you instead of just thinking about you) and so I'd have to archive them every time one popped up into my inbox. It was a choice. I wish I could say that I had read a few, but I didn't. I never listened._

_I've been afraid for a long time. My mother forgave my father. Over and over. I learned not to, early on. Living in a state of war was easier than an ambush. I'm not good at being vulnerable, and you've always known that. And maybe I thought I had been with you, and I was, to a degree. I keep turning those first four months over and over again in my mind and I can't... I had a hard time believing you'd want me._

_I've been in love with you from the moment we met, and good things, before you, didn't really happen to me. Not without me having to work for them. And I worked for it, you, which was in retrospect, stupid, because you were a person. You wanted someone who would... you were looking for someone who wouldn't be like Brian. And all I ever learned about love was how to hit someone back harder and you liked me and I didn't have to work for it and didn't know what to do. I never... you're so good at being vulnerable. I probably came off as distant, I think. And we barely knew each other as it was. And you were looking for someone, after Brian, who wasn't going to rip you apart for taking what you wanted, and we worked together and we were both ambitious and it was probably a relief to you._

_You've always allowed me my flaws, and at the first sign of you having trouble I shut you out._

_And I think I'm starting to learn what it's like to be on your knees. I'm learning to be on my knees, at least. And I have to pull myself up, because you're not here to help me, which is my own goddamn fault. I know I need to learn a lot. And unlearn bad habits. I’m seeing Habib. Every week. You’d be proud._

_I'm running out of emails to reply to. I don't know what I'm going to do when they're done. Maybe beg Sloan to send you messages. But... please be safe. Please be careful, MacKenzie. I'm half out of my mind because of half the shit that comes down the wire out of Syria._

_You look good, in the footage we get. You look healthier._

_I love you. I’m waiting. For whenever you come home._

_Take your time. God knows I did._

— _W_

_[email sent on 08/02/13 from 1.21.99.3781 at 3:04 AM EST]_

Oh.

(She laughs a little, wiping tears out from under her lenses.)

She actually doesn’t remember writing the email from Landstuhl. Trying to piece together those hazy, drug-laden weeks, she thinks she wrote it in the stretch of time where her parents had left to go back to London and Jim was spending his days, by her direction, at CENTCOM chasing stories for them.

And she’s not… she’s… well, she is on her knees.

Face in the sand.

Made it to the shore, out of the waves, but she’s not gotten too much farther.

Well, no. That’s not fair to herself. Recovery is slow and not entirely linear. Some days, she’s fine. And some days she still feels like her face is in the dirt, the water lapping at her heels as a reminder that she can still be swept back out to sea.  

(And most days, she wants to be able to have sex with her husband.

It comes down to vulnerability, again.)

She wasn’t even _looking_ , after Brian. She just _was_ , with Will. And felt safe, even if she was fooling herself, believing the womanizer reputation he carried at the time (which she’s never fully understood how he obtained) to mean that he’d blow past her in a few months and then they could settle into being friends and she’d be over Brian. Rebound. Get back on her feet.

And then Will had a way of letting her be _vulnerable_ , encouraging it in some way that felt entirely natural and unconscious, perhaps because they were swimming in the same direction instead of Brian who just seemed to try to pull her along into unstable currents and with Will it was second nature even if he could come off as a bit hesitant, but sweet, and aloof in many ways, but never judgemental, always supportive.

Before she knew it Brian was huffing about how much time she was spending with her handsome Will McAvoy and it felt good, Brian being jealous and Will being himself, and suddenly long hours in his office after broadcast planning things for their show turned into her drifting back to his place and forgetting to check her phone for texts from Brian and eventually that turned into crashing on Will’s couch, her asleep on his chest with their notes spread out around them, and one morning he left a note on his pillow (nights accidentally falling asleep on his couch had turned into falling together into his bed; slow tumbles between cotton sheets that left her shaking and breathless and settled) after having to slip out for a forgotten affiliates meeting.

_Didn’t want to wake you. Back later. Love, W._

(Theirs is a story written in the margins of production schedules and interview questions, signed in initials and black ink and occasionally announced during commercial breaks, like news coming down the wire.)

She thinks he didn’t even realize that he signed it that way. At first she thought it had been a perfunctory habit, meaning nothing. But then he told her himself a few days later, having obviously forgotten about the note written in his untidy scrawl on the back of an index card, and his love for her being as thoughtless as breathing (for he had undoubtedly been half-asleep he wrote it) had knocked the air out of her at the time.

Loving Brian hadn’t been easy, and MacKenzie had thought it was a trophy, in a way. She fought hard to love Brian. She thought she had deserved his love in return, deserved the relationship. She thought that the pain, the constant re-evaluation, was proof that she deserved it.

Loving Will is a constant.

It’s always been easy, even when everything is else hard.

It’s not a trophy.

(Well, finally being married to him is kind of a trophy, but she’s being mostly facetious about that.)

Their relationship has always had it’s own laws. Some savage, some gentle. Rarely making any real sense to outsiders not versed in their private history.

Mac looks up when Jim knocks on the glass next to the door.

“Hey.”

“You ready?”

Exiting out of her email, Mac shuts the lid of her laptop and pushes the chair opposite her own at Will’s table out with her toes. Jim drops down into it.

“Yeah, I’m ready.”  


 

* * *

  
Maggie thinks there are two kinds of people in the world: laughers and criers.

Jim is a laugher.

Sam is a laugher, too, shaking back her auburn hair with her fingers and dryly commenting on her trauma with a sense of detached humor. Mac is a laugher, when she’s with the two of them, but softer with Will, because the laughter, the irreverence towards their own lives, freaks him out, so it dies behind Mac’s eyes when he steps through the door for interview prep and she takes his hand, lacing their fingers together in her lap.

Maggie isn’t quite sure what Will is, if only because he spends so much time holding it in, until it seeps out in an alcohol-drenched melancholy or bursts out in rage. But at least he’s started laughing again, Mac’s presence alone generally causing at least the _threat_ of a smile.

Sam and Mac and the rest of the team handle it well, Maggie thinks. It’s not until it gets flipped around, to the people who were home finding out as the reports came down the wires, that things get emotional.

Because Mac is perfectly capable at reciting at what happened, even if she has a bit of a time at looking directly at the camera. But hearing Will and Jim (and Sloan, Elliot, Meg, Danny, herself) talking about hearing about _it_ (Maggie remembers hearing about _it_ , seeing Jim stalk between Mac’s office and Will’s, and just _knowing_ then that the reports were true, knowing that something had gone wrong, feeling the dread settle over the staff who were still there that long after broadcast) sets Mac on edge.

But then there’s a moment where Will and Mac are talking about seeing each other for the first time in ten months (they’ve chosen to disclose a little—they had a massive fight Election Night over Genoa which caused a bitter parting of the ways and an evening of the scales, a more rounded history of what happened with Brian Brenner, and the fact that they hadn’t spoken ten months) that Maggie knows will get replayed over and over again.

It’s almost like checking in, or would be, if it was conscious. It’s more of a reflex than anything else, when Mac’s in the middle of describing the first of two proposals, laughing at herself. He’s not... content, but rather _intent_ , Maggie supposes. Not anxious or on-guard, just… aware. Mac looks up at him while he’s looking at her, and she smiles, shaking her head slightly, and his lips quirk into a hazard of a grin before she squeezes his fingers, continuing on with her story without missing a beat.

It’s like watching two people having two simultaneous conversations.

(Not that most of the interview is anywhere near light-hearted. But Will and Mac’s tabloid churning romance will probably be used for balance.)

Maggie gets dragged into the chair at one point by Jim and Sloan, because of her self-prescribed role as “keeper of the footage” and apparently what Sloan describes as “immense grace under pressure at a time when the newsroom was being brought to it’s knees.”

She had just been doing her job, she says, deflecting Sloan and Elliot’s assertions that her presence in the newsroom for what eventually amounted to an uninterrupted 72 hours kept people with someone to look to.

(Mac almost cries then, and hugs her for a solid five minutes once she’s off-camera.)

By the end of it, they all need a drink.  


 

* * *

  
The first thing Sloan realizes is that, with Kenzie back, the previous seating arrangement of her and Maggie flanking Will on the couch in Hang Chews no longer applies.

(There’s a moment of friendly squabbling that Mac enjoys spectating a little too much before Maggie shoves her towards Don with a snorted _you have a boyfriend, use him_ before sitting down next to Will. Sloan takes her point, sitting on Don’s lap and ignoring his small but appreciative yelp of surprise.)

At some point Charlie drifts down, and directs the conversation to his deft parent-trapping Mac and Will together not once, but twice.

(The directing is mostly Charlie sitting down and opening with “so Ed Marsh called and asked how Mac is doing,” and Will laughing into his hands for a solid minute, and the rest of them looking, confused, at the three of them.

Except Sam, who seems to know too much to ever be friends with Will, or so she told him before walking off with a smug grin on her face. Sloan’s not entirely certain if Sam was serious or just fucking with Will, but either way, it worked. Will looked pretty freaked out by the notion.

Sloan thinks she and Sam really should become friends.)

This segues into the origins of Will and MacKenzie 1.0.

"I wasn't supposed to be working for _News Night_. I was supposed to be working for Ed Marsh at ten!"

"You _were_ working for Ed Marsh at ten," Will grumbles.

Mac laughs, leaning her head back into his shoulder, contemplating the bottom of her martini glass. "For _two weeks_ , before you poached me."

"God, I hated... " He furrows his brows, smiling a bit when Sloan thinks he honestly can't remember the man's name. "Who was my EP back then?"

“The man’s name was Adrian,” Mac informs him, slowly.

Will still doesn’t entirely believe her. "Are you sure?"

When Kenzie looks up at him (she’s slumped down a bit down, deep into the couch cushions and leaning into Will’s side) she has the most incredulous look on her face, eyebrows high in her bangs and lips pursed. There’s a slight pause during which she places her empty glass onto the low table in front of her before she continues.

" _Yes_.” She takes the hand attached to the arm he has slung over her shoulder and starts lacing and unlacing their fingers. “Anyway, I was Ed Marsh's EP for my first two weeks at the New York bureau—two weeks, during which Charlie kept trying to introduce us, but I'd heard the rumors—"

Will perks up at that. "What rumors?"

"That you were a womanizer." Mac bites her lip over a smile. "Which is funny now, because we all know you're terrible _at it_. Anyway, two weeks, and then Adrian got the stomach flu while you were in hair and makeup. And _apparently_ , your Senior Producer couldn’t hack it."

"I was new." He offers by way of explanation, raising an eyebrow at Charlie.

"Hardly." Mac turns back to her and a smiling Charlie, who clearly remembers the story well. Or at least fondly, Sloan thinks, by the conspiratorial glint in his eye. "And so Charlie comes into my office at 7:35 and asks me to cover _News Night,_ because apparently _no one else_ could do it, like, you know, Will’s staff."

"The show starts and I have a voice I have never heard in my ear before." Will sighs, half affectionately and half exasperatedly. "You were infuriating."

Don snorts, jostling her a bit and Sloan clasps her hands over where his sit at her waist. Sloan thinks she should have presumed that Will and Mac met by arguing over something.

" _Adrian_ ,” Mac contends, “let you get away with too much."

"I hated him."

"I know, dear. Anyway, by the C-block I thought he was going to strangle me because I kept calling him out over dropping rebuttals and not going as hard on guests as he could, and, you know, his general tendency to pander—"

"I did not pander—"

Mac sighs, a staged sort of gesture in an old, routine argument, twisting his wedding ring on his finger. Sloan can hear Don make a snide comment to Jim and she pinches his thigh.

"You pandered. And then kept demanding that I come out during commercial breaks."

"Which you thought was _hilarious_ ,” Will scoffs, but looks like he’s enjoying himself entirely too much.

"Because I thought the face of ACN was going to _kill me,_ or worse, _get me fired._ ” They all laugh at that. “It was a laugh or cry situation. Anyway, after broadcast I tried to flee back to my office, or well, my plan was to get to his office so at least I wouldn't get yelled at in front of the entire bullpen, since I was barely thirty and all of his APs at the time were older than me—"

"So after broadcast I walk—"

"Stomp,” Mac interjects, tugging on his fingers.

Maggie giggles.

"— _walk_ into my office to see her sitting on my desk. And I swear, I was going to chew her out, but instead I asked her to dinner."

"It was my legs, wasn't it?" she asks seriously.

Will opens and closes his mouth around a few aborted sentences, before letting himself smile.

(This is good, Sloan thinks. They're both good. They're all good.) 

"50% your legs. Maybe. Little more, little less." Sloan laughs, and Kenzie uncrosses and crosses the limbs in question out of what Sloan thinks may be appreciation. Charlie crosses his arms under his chest, grinning knowingly, and Will tilts his drink in his direction. "And the other 50% was the fact that the first words out of your mouth after I walked through the door were 'before you say anything, just remember that I have a Peabody and you do not, you Republican nitwit.'"

Mac nods along, bursting into laughter at the end of his story.

But Charlie’s not finished.

“Will is forgetting, of course, that the week before—”

“I am _not_ forgetting.” He takes a swallow of Jameston before continuing, prodding Maggie in the side when she laughs a little too hard for his liking. “Meanwhile, Charlie had been telling me for a week that I needed to get off my ass and stop being complacent, since he was bringing up a thirty-year-old spitfire with a fresh Peabody who had reported more news in one day than I had in my entire career and if I didn’t start behaving, he was going to let her loose on me.”

“See?” Charlie says triumphantly, jabbing his finger towards Will and Mac. “And look how that turned out.”

“I still don’t have a Peabody!”

Sloan (and everyone else, except Will himself) doesn’t miss Mac holding up three fingers and smiling to herself, before putting on what Sloan has named her “supportive wife”face (or rather, her “catering to Will’s neuroses” face) and patting him consolingly on the cheek.

“I’ll get you one, honey. I promise. I think it was in our vows, or something.”

 

 

* * *

  
They get home late, tipsy and still not quite down from a manic high (talking about it makes it feel over, in some strange way, like they’ve committed it to something else and now Syria is done) they’ve been on since they started drinking hours ago.

Out of habit, he offers her his wrists for her to undo his cuffs, and giggling, she pulls him closer for a kiss, sliding the buttons out of their holes before moving her hands to the front of his shirt.

“How drunk are you?” he asks, nipping at her lower lip and unzipping her pencil skirt, helping her step out of it after sending it to the floor.

MacKenzie yawns. “Not very. Just tired.”

She falls into him, laughing (she’s not drunk, honestly, just punchy and hasn’t told him that she’s read his emails, or at least one of them, not that it’s a secret it’s just that she hasn’t found the time, and oh how she loves him, her great big lout of a husband) when he catches her under her arms, kisses her neck, and sits her down onto the bed.

He snorts, stripping her down to her underwear and camisole before she rolls under the covers.

“Aren’t you going to be cold?” he asks her.

Mac sighs sleepily, turning in towards the middle of the bed. “Not with you. So hurry up.”

Fucking furnace.

She likes it, though, thinking she’ll keep him. Until she has a reason to bitch about it, come June.

But they can just crank up the A/C.

He slides into bed a few minutes later, manipulating her limbs until she’s on her other side and he’s behind her, wrapping his arms around her and burying his face in her hair.

Even though she’s not entirely sold on it, she thinks she buy the new shampoo she’s been trying again. He likes how it smells. Lavender and juniper. She doesn’t really know why he likes it. She doesn’t really care.

She should probably tell him that she read one of his emails. Sighing, nuzzling his arm, she wonders if it even matters. She thinks he’s told her almost everything anyway.

It doesn’t matter, she decides, tugging her thoughts away from her first stay at Landstuhl, supplanting them with Will sitting at her beside, overwriting the hours on the medevac where she could barely breathe she was in so much pain, hallucinating Will just to hold onto a shred of her sanity.

_I love you. I’m waiting. For whenever you come home._

_Take your time. God knows I did._

They have a nice new apartment, the kind of place that’s the envy of Upper East Side pearl-clutchers (she never thought they’d be the Upper East Side type, but here they are, mostly by accident and happenstance, but to be honest, she never planned on Will in the first place) but she’s still trying to come home.

Seven years, she thinks, is a very long time. Seven years, or twenty-eight months, or thirty-two, or ten, another three and a half.

It’s _important_. Intimacy. And while it’s probably been good that they walked before running (or rather, fucking), she misses it. And she knows he misses it. And it’s not a problem, between them (yet, or… Will’s very patient and very sweet but his touches are getting more and more chaste, hedging his bets in a way, she supposes, and it makes her sad) but it’s a problem in her own mind. They’re there. They should be there.

He’s waiting.

(And she _knows_ that he’s anxious. She knows how much Xanax he needs to function and why he hovers and why he doesn’t let go of her on the weekends and she lets him, she knows he doesn’t sleep as well as he should and it’s why she lets him sleep for as long as he can and she wants to be with him.)

She’s done waiting for herself.

She just doesn’t know _how_.

Although, she supposes, revelations are generally ill-timed between the two of them. But they do happen, eventually.

(That’s the last thought that runs through her mind before she drifts off to sleep.)  


 

* * *

  
The tide rushes out, dragging her back. Wave-tossed, she drowns again, water-logged boots on her feet dragging her down to the bottom. Blood pounds in her ears, or it’s the cacophony of mortar and shells on concrete, and she can’t breathe, or open her eyes. It’s pulling her back, and under, unbraiding nerves and fraying muscle filaments, ripping her thoughts apart, scattering them through riptides, under the waves.

Gasping, and then she’s in the medevac again, strapped down, unable to breathe. She can’t breathe in the moment next, limbs kicking sluggishly and slowing further still, the water pressing down, waves rising up over her head.

And then she hits the bottom, where the currents are stilled. She feels soft sediment under her limbs, feels her own thoughts drifting and settling, even though she cannot get her mouth to open, hands to move, feet to kick.

She’s screaming, even if only in her head.

No one can reach her here.

Through seconds slipping farther from the next, she can hear it—the news alert sound, office chatter, fingers typing on keyboards. And she can’t reach them. She’s waited too long to come home. The burning in her lungs is gone, replaced by a crushing bodily dictate that strips her of her senses, until it all rushes out, all of it—her job, her people, Maggie, Sloan, Charlie, Will. Her lifelines cut. Threads fraying out, settling.

She can’t go back. She’s left them. She’s left him.

She’s dead.

(Drowned.)

And then she screams.

(The tide rushes in.)  


 

* * *

  
Her eyes are open, but she’s not awake, and he can’t get her to wake up. Her eyes are open, pupils contracting with fear, and he doesn’t know where she is, or when, and he feels like a fucking idiot because five hours ago she was laughing and smiling but she spent most of the day recounting having sarin dropped on her, so of fucking course—

Through a film of sheer panic he realizes that he’s begging her to wake up, before another scream can gurgle up from between her lips. This isn’t like before. This isn’t thrashing limbs and some violent replay that wakes her up seconds later. She’s always woken up before, needing space, and he knows to give her space, that she’ll hit him if he wakes her up because her body’s gone into fight-or-flight mode, but this is neither.

“Wake up. Come on, Mac, wake up.”

She’s breathing, and she’s obviously in distress, but she’s breathing. He doesn’t want to shake her, and he won’t hurt her, and he doesn’t know where she is, except gone.

Will woke up when she was thrashing, maybe ten minutes ago, making the usual noises of distress that Mac makes during a nightmare, but she’s always come out of them before; she’s stopped fighting but the dream is continuing on, so he’s thrown on the lights and he has to wait for her to come out of it, he knows, watching her chest rise and fall in powerful increments.

Forcing himself to calm down, he sits up next to her and takes her hands between his, trying to squeeze some warmth back into her shockingly cold fingers.

His chest floods with relief when, minutes later, she blinks, throat churning out half syllables and hard vowels instead of another scream, a current of energy, electricity, something, rippling through her.

“Hey, hey.” He traces her jaw with his thumb, trying to draw her attention away from whatever is dying in front of her eyes. “You’re okay. You’re safe. You’re okay.”

She swallows hard in between pants of breath, nodding, reaching for him.  

“Do you wanna get up?” he asks a few minutes later, when she’s no longer trying to crawl inside his skin.

She manages to get out the affirmative, voice low and strangled.

He helps her sit up, before getting out of bed to circle around to her side, pulling her deadened limbs up, pulling her against him. Unsteady on her feet, she holds onto him, blinking. She’s cold, shivering in uneven spurts, covered in sweat.

Not entirely back.

He pulls MacKenzie towards the shower, murmuring nonsense in her ear. Feels the adrenaline receding from his own body, and by the time he has the water on she’s awake enough to pull her clothes off her own body, pad towards him to do his, an insistence in her movements giving him pause, ceding control to her.  


 

* * *

  
Her world has narrowed to one simple truth: _she’s home._ No more running. The two words push through her bloodstream, inhabiting the spaces in her bones, every inch, every nook, every empty space. Will’s arms wrap around her, walking her back into the shower. He’s reading her. She’s not hiding anything.

Her thoughts have settled.

She’s not drowning anymore. They’re not waiting for each other, they’re not punishing each other. They’ve broken their pattern. Given an inch and gotten a whole fucking nautical mile. And maybe Will was never a lighthouse (or he was, for her, and she was his) and maybe she’s finally faced it, because they’ve face it together. It’s a constant, not a choice. Like breathing, after seven long years of drowning, or running, or facing whatever storm she’s fashioned for herself, in the hope that it would destroy her and change her and leave behind the wreck of the woman who’d ruined her life. She and Will are through it. They’re no longer looking back. The past is no longer something they clench in their fists to wield like a weapon, to uncover or to throw into the sea.

“I love you,” she says, like an answer to a question, when his fingers comb through her wet hair and she chases water droplets down his chest.

Somewhere in the room over, a clock chimes three.     

It’s late.

She doesn’t care.

Neither does he, from the look on his face. She can read him too, knows what it means when head tilts just so, when he crowds her with his hips, when he presses his thumbs into her skin. He’s waiting for her cue, but he thinks he knows what she’s thinking.

“MacKenzie.”

He says her name so carefully, trying not to misuse it. Trying not to push her, but wanting it all the same.

“I’m okay,” she tells him gently, but with certainty. “I’m safe. I’m home.”

Arousal coils and releases under her skin, under where his fingers trail. She presses up against him, and they kiss under the spray of the shower, encased in fogged glass. MacKenzie lifts herself up onto her tiptoes.

_I need you, I need you, I need you_.

And she has him. Love, not a question, but an answer and a constant. She’s come home, they’ve both come home. Love is a constant but they’ve had to make their choices, and here they finally are.

His hands remember her body, the where to press to discover the secrets of her flesh, to make her tremble against him, and he backs her up against the glass wall at the perimeter of the shower, hands chasing water downwards to between her thighs. Looks at her, and she nods.

Slowly, chasing a question, and she says _yes_ , again and again, when his fingers curl inside her, when his mouth finds the yielding skin of her neck, her shoulder, her breasts. When his other hand braces her waist, and then stops when his mouth finds hers again, tongue sliding along hers when she begins to shake, one hand wrapping around his wrist, fingers on the other curling into the small of his back, marking half-moon crescents into his skin.

Says yes when he shuts off the water and starts again, skimming water off her skin with her towel, kissing love into her neck, passing stretches of skin and relearning her topography (in this way, not like he hasn’t spent three months holding her, or years trying to imprint memory into reality) until her breasts grow heavy, her face flushing with color for reasons not owed to hot water.

Yes again, when he carries her to bed like he didn’t the night they first came home, when he slides her thighs over his shoulders.

He laughs when her first climax is accompanied by relieved giggles, and she curses herself, and then curses him when he bends to the task again, until all thought is driven from her mind entirely and her fingers wend into his hair.

(He leaves fingerprint bruises on her legs. She doesn’t mind. They’ve left marks on each other along the way, regardless.)

And again, before she drags him up her body.

She murmurs his name, before whimpering it, remembering what he likes and how, and slowly they knit back together in this one last way, until all they can do is let the currents carry them.  


 

* * *

  
Will falls asleep wrapped up in MacKenzie, his nose in her damp hair, her fingers trailing down his bicep, her breath hot against his shoulder. He’s awake long after she drifts off.

He doesn’t know what precipitated this.

Tracing an old shrapnel wound of hers along her knee, he thinks about the long nights when she was gone, when he couldn’t find sleep at all, would find solace in letting the days blur together. Writing emails like sending ships blindly out into the night.

But he does know what it’s like to not need your scars anymore. He knows he should have figured that out on Election Night, would have, back in August, given anything to have figured it out on Election Night. He won’t question her. He trusts her. If she needs his help, she’ll ask.

She settles against him, like the bones of an old house into the foundation. Like a lighthouse into the sand, down past the clay and into bedrock.

She rests.

And so does he. 


	6. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** Well... this is it! Thanks to everyone who has read and enjoyed. :)

MacKenzie wakes up the next morning with Will’s face pressed into her stomach.

Unsure as usual how they move so much while they sleep without waking up, but entirely too content to care, she carefully slides out from his grasp and eases herself out of bed. Walks past her crutches and the cotton robe slung over the chair on her side of the room to the bathroom. Goes through some of her morning routine, minutiae like taking medications and brushing her teeth, finger combing her pillow-dried hair into a ponytail.  

Grabs her robe, puts her arms through the sleeves but doesn’t bother to close it while walking to the kitchen and starting a pot of coffee. Takes in the papers. Fixes two cups of coffee after the machine hisses water through beans (Will likes to make fun of her particularly high-octane way of brewing coffee, but she knows he’s pulled as many all-nighters as her) and tucks the _New York Times_ under her arm, carrying the mugs carefully back to their bedroom.

Placing Will’s onto his nightstand, she covers the top with a saucer, stopping up the steam and tamping down warmth. He’ll be too lazy to get up to microwave it, but will complain anyway if it’s room temperature. They’ll laze in bed and make fun of dayside until he runs out of coffee and drags her back into the kitchen to make breakfast.

Blowing over the rim of her cup, she stands at the door that opens out onto the terrace. Mac is still bad at sleeping for much more than four hours at a time, but once Will wakes up he’ll be able to coax her back to sleep.

She’s happy to watch the sunrise from their bedroom, the pastel fingers of dawn whitewashing the New York City skyline, brightening up the corners of the park that they can see from their bedroom windows on the west side. It’s a calm morning. Cold, but not unbearably so, and not windy.

Her legs are sore, and she thinks she has a hickey on her shoulder (now _that’s_ a trophy), but she likes it, just like how she likes seeing Will, still naked, sprawled out between their sheets, flecks of sunlight catching golden strands of his impossibly mussed hair.

She giggles, turning back to the skyline, thinking that it’s a good thing they don’t have to show their faces anywhere today.

Ten minutes later, she’s entranced enough that she doesn’t hear Will walking stiffly across the floor to come up behind her and wrap his arms around her middle.

“What are you doing up?”

Mac startles, and sighs when he pulls the elastic out of her hair, shaking her locks loose. Leaning back against him, she hums when they sway almost imperceptibly.

“Do you intend on chasing me back into bed?”

He kisses her shoulder, peeling her robe away from her skin, sliding it off her arms and she has to shuffle her coffee between her hands to keep from spilling.

“Yes.”

She laughs softly before finishing the rest of her coffee, and sets the cup down on her way to the bed and into his arms.

“Good.”

It’s as far as she plans on him ever having to chase her ever again.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
